(Continued from Part 1.)
In the lead-up to our move, I had taken a soils class as part of my degree program. The professor opened my eyes to soil biology, nutrient cycles, and the damage done by repeated deep tillage. Plow, harrow then rototill was the only system I had ever seen for large home gardens, not to mention most row crop farming. I didn’t fall down the rabbit hole of no till gardening, I charged down it. My exploration coincided with the final two years prior to our move and the two years we rented prior to finding our homestead. I studied cover crops, green manures, benefits of rotational grazing, composting, double dig, lasagna gardening, swales, hügelkultur……..and better options for irrigation. Now that we had land, it became the laboratory to begin trying out all the theories I had collected (and ad nauseum shared with my wife and our extended family). We’ve spent the last ten years building soil, expanding our gardens, starting an orchard, hosting tours and refining our irrigation system.
As we planned the layout for our first garden on the homestead, we chose a typical row layout for beans, corn and potatoes that would allow us to use the “new to me” brown drip tube. This product has integrated pressure compensating emitters evenly spaced and each rated for a specified output. Specifically, we purchased rolls that have emitters rated for 0.9 gallons per hour spaced every twelve inches. The tubing can be branched or joined to other lines using barbed fittings and is best used in conjunction with a pressure reducer in the range of 15 psi to prevent the barbed fittings from slipping loose after exposure to a days’ worth of summer sun. The emitters themselves had no problem withstanding our wells maximum pressure of 50 psi.
For our hilled vegetables such as zucchini, squash, pumpkins and cucumbers we stayed with a modified Arizona method where we ran the half inch black blank tubing beside each plant and installed a piece of one-quarter-inch drip tube with a dripper on the free end at each plant. For tomatoes and peppers, we followed the same pattern as for squash, only these plants were staked or caged in rows instead of clusters of hills and the quarter-inch drip lines were left open, ie no dripper for each plant. For the first year, we ran garden hoses from our house as the supply and installed hose ends using barb x NPT paired with NPT x FGHT (female garden hose thread) fittings to connect to the drip and blank tubing runs.Continue reading“Practical Homestead Irrigation – Part 2, by A.F.”
