Before I get to all of the wonderfulness of drip irrigation (which there is so much wonderful!), I just wanted to remind you to head to my Instagram to enter my giveaway for a $50 Nordstrom gift card!

Ok, now to drip irrigation excitement….

I have long been the person dragging a hose around all sides of the house watering my flower beds. I would spend an hour every other day watering. Somedays it was more! I prayed for rain and welcomed the relief from watering. This year, I decided I was finally going to invest the time to figure out how to install drip irrigation to the flower beds I hated watering the absolute most. Admittedly, I’d watched videos for years about how to install it, where to get the parts, putting it on a timer, and I just never pulled the trigger. It seemed too difficult and complicated.

But what I learned this year is GOOD NEWS! It really isn’t hard to install. And now I’m living the dream of just hooking up the hose and letting the water drip out into my flower beds for an hour while I sit in my air conditioned house and write this blog post.

Here are the supplies I needed:

• Tubing: I picked up two types of tubing. One with no holes and one with emitters every 12 in. I used DIG products from Home Depot for this whole project. I wouldn’t say I’m married to that line, but it was an easy place to start by just using one brand, and knowing that it would all work together.
• Connectors: I picked up a good amount of various connectors. Those included elbows, couplings, tees.
• End cap: I got several end caps like these. Ultimately, I decided to put the entire flower bed on one zone, so I really only needed one end cap per flower bed.
• Hose adapters: It was easiest for me to connect the drip system to my garden hose and run it that way whenever I needed/wanted to water. So I bought the following to do that connection: female hose thread, pressure regulator, back flow preventer
• For the tubing with no emitters, I knew I was going to run this along the back of my garden where some of my larger shrubs, bushes, and plants are located, so I didn’t want emitters every 12 inches, but I did want some emitters that would direct the water directly at my perennials along the back. I bought a hole puncher and 1 gallon per hour emitters to add emitters exactly where I wanted them in the black tubing along the back.
• The last thing you need are stakes to stake down the tubing into the garden. You can use just normal landscaper fabric staples to do that or these.

Once you have your materials, it’s a matter of laying out your tubing in the pattern you want and nailing it down. I wanted to keep it simple and just do rows of tubing because this isn’t a complete perennial bed, meaning that I pull out almost 75% of this bed every year and replant it, so plants aren’t always in the same place year after year.

Once you do your final connection, you want to test it. A lot of people put their drip system on an automatic timer that hooks up to your water spigot at the house. I chose to just keep mine manual because of the location of our water spigot versus flower bed – I would have had to tunnel the tubing underneath the driveway to get it from the flower bed to the spigot. Not worth it.

The whole installation into one flower bed took me about an hour once I had all the materials. The final step was to just cover the tubing with mulch and enjoy not hauling a hose over there to water every other day. I’m already contemplating adding drip systems to other beds, and even potentially planters and pots next year…

I think it’s safe to file this under, “why didn’t I do this years ago?!”