An Experiment in Scotch

Back in Novem­ber, I wrote about my efforts to improve the pro­duc­tiv­ity of my veg­gie gar­dens by rais­ing the beds and dras­ti­cally improv­ing the soil. How­ever, in North Texas, all the good soil in the world does you no good if you can’t get con­sis­tent mois­ture on the gar­den. With that in mind, I engi­neered a water­ing sys­tem project that was com­pleted a cou­ple of weeks ago.

This is where I started. I bought 1 inch PVC pipe and gar­den hose con­nec­tors from Lowes (Home Depot didn’t have the actual hose con­nec­tors). An arti­cle in the Dal­las Morn­ing News that I was loosely bas­ing my design on used clamps instead of actual hose con­nec­tors but I actu­ally pre­fer my way because it’s not as likely to leak given my ter­ri­ble engi­neer­ing skills.

These are the basic mate­ri­als. I had the PVC primer and adhe­sive from last sum­mer when I poked a hole through an exist­ing sprin­kler pipe with a pitch­fork. As men­tioned above, the con­nec­tors fit into the T-Bar con­nec­tors on the pipe and then screw on to the end of the soaker hoses. I didn’t end up glu­ing the hose con­nec­tors into the T-Bar con­nec­tors because in the win­ter, I won’t have as big of a gar­den as sum­mer­time and I’d like to be able to cap the pipe in places I don’t need a hose.

I fas­tened the PVC to the 2x12s using some basic con­nec­tors I found in the PVC aisle at Home Depot. They screwed into the 2x12s and kept the PVC very secure. I didn’t secure the pipe until I was done cut­ting and piec­ing together all the PVC.

Halfway done. At this point, I had 20 feet of PVC glued together with 12 T-Bar con­nec­tors where I could con­nect hoses. Ini­tially, I was only going to do this sys­tem for the big bed but my OCD kicked in and I real­ized that it would be stu­pid to have built two beds and only apply the sys­tem to one of them. So I had to fig­ure out how to get the PVC to the other bed which was not in any way par­al­lel to the big bed. Scooter always seems to keep a care­ful eye on my gar­den­ing projects. Mostly he just keeps an eye on whether or not I’m com­ing to give him a bath or not.

You can pretty much get your­self out of any painted cor­ner with PVC because there are so many con­nec­tors. I had bought entirely too much PVC any­way and so I added a cou­ple of elbow joints, ran PVC halfway down and then across to the other gar­den. I ran 4 con­nec­tors off of that pipe into gar­den 1 which you can see below.

Here’s the timer that dri­ves the entire sys­tem. It can be sched­uled to run from once a week up to 4 times a day on a sched­ule. Dur­ing the spring, it will prob­a­bly run a cou­ple times a day for 15–20 min­utes. In the sum­mer, it will go for up to 4 times a day for the same amount. Again, because the idea is to have con­sis­tent mois­ture, I want it to run sev­eral times a day for short peri­ods of time. If you’ve ever grown toma­toes and had them crack badly, that comes from a dry spell fol­lowed by lots of water fol­lowed by dry again. For per­fect toma­toes, water has to be consistent.

And the final result. As you can see, in my ini­tial design, I have 10 foot hoses con­nected at both ends to the PVC main­line using male and female con­nec­tors. How­ever, upon fur­ther reflec­tion and some plant­ing, I real­ized that it’s bet­ter to just con­nect the male ends of the soaker hoses, use all 12 con­nec­tion points for 12 hoses and run a hose all the way around a row. This pro­vides mois­ture to both sides of the row which is the point.

One of the pluses to this set up is that i can con­nect fer­til­izer or vine­gar (good for slightly acid­i­fy­ing the soil which toma­toes pre­fer) to the start of the PVC and fer­til­ize the entire gar­den through the system.

So far, I’ve planted onions, red and green cab­bage, brus­sel sprouts, broc­coli, snow peas and sugar snap peas. I haven’t turned the sys­tem on full time yet because I still need to get trel­lises installed for the peas. I have tested it and it works great.

Future improve­ments are extend­ing the far end of it around the cor­ner and then back down the far side of the gar­den so that I can run a cou­ple of hoses down there around the black­berry bush and along any­thing I plant in the 4 feet of old gar­den space I have down there.

Over­all, it was a pretty straight­for­ward project. Total cost was around $150 though that could have been cheaper if I would have planned a lit­tle bet­ter and not over­bought the PVC. If it pro­duces toma­toes through­out the sum­mer, it will be $150 well spent.