A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about running drip irrigation in my flower beds. I started off small with a very manageable one garden bed having drip irrigation, but over the past few years, I’ve expanded to run drip to nearly all of my beds AND my containers.
Not to be dramatic, but in the life of gardening, drip irrigation has been a GAME CHANGER.
I wake up every morning, and there’s a little pool of water coming out of each of my containers before I’ve even poured my morning coffee. I spend all of my time gardening outside cutting back, de-heading, and enjoying rather than watering every. single. day. It makes going on vacations a breeze, because I don’t wonder if my plants will die while I’m gone. It’s been AMAZING.
Given that it’s been a few years, I’ve honed my favorite products and technique, and it’s time for an updated post.
For flower beds, I ran 1/2″ drip irrigation to them. I originally started out with the DIG brand, which is sold at Home Depot, but I think it’s kind of tough to work with and manipulate into the connectors. If I could start all over again, I’d use the Rain Bird brand sold at Home Depot or Ace. The issue is that you kind of need to stick with one brand for the lines and connectors, because even though there are many brands that are 1/2″ lines/connectors, they don’t necessarily fit snuggly together, and thus, leak at the connection spot.
To run drip lines to a flower bed, you’ll want, depending on the comapct-ness of your plants, supply tubing, emitter tubing, a bunch of different options of connectors (t-shape, l-shape, straight), and an end plug to clamp off the end of your line.
You’ll also likely need a hole punch, if you are going to add some targeted emitters to your supply line, as well as emitters that stick in the hole and deliver the water to your plant.
You’ll also want either 1/2″ irrigation stakes or I opted for the basic metal garden staples to hold down the line into the ground.
I ran 1/2″ supply line tubing (that’s tubing that is just a solid tube with no holes/emitters) to the areas of my beds that had larger established plants. Where I had my established plants, I added emitters using a hole punch and adding specific 1 GPH emitters to water those specific plants. Then the parts of the bed that didn’t have established plants and I put in annuals every year, I used an emitter supply line that already has emitter holes punched in it. I personally chose the one that had emitters every 12 inches – but they come in every 18 inches as well. That way I wasn’t worrying about getting water to one specific plant per emitter, but it instead just kind of saturates the whole area for me.
I’ve used two types of timers as well at my spigot – the Rainpoint timer and the Orbit timer- both have performed fine, but I think I prefer the Orbit brand. It has slightly more functionality than Rainpoint. You kind of have to decide how many zones you want hooked up at the same time to automatically water to determine how many outputs on your timer you need. For instance, in our backyard, I have two drip zones that water at different intervals, and I wanted to have a regular hose hooked up all of the time that I could use normally, so I opted for a three output timer in our backyard.
Lastly, I did add drip irrigation to all of my container pots last year, and loved it. I have a ton of containers on our patio in the summer and they require daily watering. I loved this kit – it had everything I needed to run it, and I just bought extra tubing and emitters when I ran out, but it was a great starter kit for containers.
Drip irrigation can seem overwhelming at the beginning, but it’s fairly intuitive once you get started. If you’re starting for the first time, I’d recommend starting with just one smaller bed, and then increasing the area you cover farther down the road, like the next gardening season. There’s always something to be learned the first (and second, and third) time around you do something that’s unique to your own circumstances, so splitting it up in chunks makes it much more manageable!
