Gardening Tip: Veggie Garden Watering
Just a quick tip - if you have a lawn / landscaping irrigation system, easier than repurposing a zone or adding a zone for your garden beds, might be to buy a second controller that hooks up to a tap like this one. I found this in my local hardware store along with all the other sprinkler supplies.
Out of laziness, I previously had my garden beds attached to parts of two separate zones used for the landscaping that was there, and getting a good balance between these was always a challenge. Buying a $40 controller like the one, and running an irrigation line over the ground, or buried in the gravel path, direct to each garden bed above really helped solve that problem this year. The 1/2" main lines run past each garden bed, with two or three 1/4" branches going to adjustable sprayers or drip line for each plant.
Oh, and a couple of tips for using it:
- Use a manifold above it so that you can still use that tap.
- Put a backflow preventer below it, otherwise when the backflow preventer fails, you'll have quite lot of water leaking all day until you notice it. At least by putting it after, it'll only leak when the valve is turned on, hopefully 10-20 minutes per day. Don't ask how I figured that one out!