DIY: Santa Rosa homesteader installs drip system

I love to garden. I love planting and harvesting and just walking around and observing. However, I do not like to water by hand.

Until recently on my homestead, I had to water everything with a hose. I only had one spigot, near the house, which wasn't at all close to my garden.

This meant I had to haul around 300 feet of hose every day, dealing with inevitable kinks and leaky connections. Plus, watering by hose takes time, and the amount of water my plants received was pretty inconsistent. It also meant that I couldn't go anywhere, because while I can convince a friend to stop by to check eggs and feed the cats, I'm not one to ask someone to spend an hour or more dealing with my disaster of a hose every day.

So after three years, I finally got it together and put in an irrigation system.

I work best under a deadline for most projects, so I booked a camping trip. My system had to be completed by then or my plants would seriously suffer. That, and I didn't want to repeat another year of blossom=end rot on my heirloom tomatoes from inconsistent watering, so it needed to be in before fruit started to form. I had about a month to get this project done.

The first step was establishing zones. Each of these zones would be translated into a program on the controller, each zone would be turned on and off by an electric valve and the water distributed by drip tubing.

To avoid over- or under-watering a plant, it's important that all the plants in a zone have the same water needs. All my raised vegetable beds had the same water needs, so they would be their own zone, with my fruit trees being another.

That's all that I have planted now, so I could have just stopped there. But I figured if I was going to dig up the yard, I may as well do all of it, so I brainstormed zones based on future plantings.

Plan garden first

I drew a big map of my property and created approximate areas with the type of plantings I would have. Low-water natives in the front, mixed hedgerow of low-water shrubs along the fence line, medium-water-use herbal and tea garden near the patio and medium-water-use pollinator garden surrounding the vegetable garden.

Some of the zones were very large, so they had to be separated into smaller segments to ensure I had enough water pressure to make it though the pipes. At the end of the planning stage, I had 14 zones.

After I had that plan, I created a parts list and became friends with Kris Loomis at Wyatt Irrigation, who was invaluable for helping me figure out exactly what I needed. Besides the basics like lots of PVC pipe, fittings and glue, the wire and valves and controllers, I also got a separate water meter so I can know exactly how much water I am using and a weather sensor that will connect to my controller to adjust the programed watering times, based on current weather.

I shoved all the parts in my Civic, had the pipe delivered and was ready for the next step.

I used handfuls of gypsum (instead of paint) to map out where we needed to place the pipes, then we rented a trencher to dig the ditches. Operation of heavy equipment falls under the homestead responsibilities of my husband, and once we figured out how to operate the machine, he did a great job of digging straight lines.

It was amazing to see the difference in the soil being turned up from the areas I had sheet mulched. It was darker in color and visibly richer in organic matter than the pale and super fine grains of the areas not amended.

I used a trenching shovel to clean out the trenches, then arranged all my pipes and their fittings.

I had experience piecing and gluing together PVC from past projects, but I was surprised how difficult it was to deal with the long 20-foot lengths of 1-inch pipes. At first, I tried cutting the pipe by hand, but quickly gave up and bought a pipe cutter.

Bit by bit, I got all my valves and about 450 feet of pipes pieced together. The valves were placed underground in boxes, with a stub-out connection to transition to drip.

Wiring the valves was a new experience for me. Irrigation wire is direct burial, so I was able to lay it in the trench along with the pipe. Each valve got its own strand of wire, one end hooked up to the controller, one end on the valve. After only occasional swear words and battling with wire strippers and tiny copper wires, I can now say that I am proficient in valve wiring.

Wiring, gluing, wrapping

The project took about three weeks, off and on. I'd sit on the couch and wrap fittings with pipe tape while watching a movie. One day I'd work on gluing sections, then another I'd work on wiring.

Once the valves for the veggies were finished, I'd work on the drip system for those beds. It took a lot of work: My hands were torn up and sore, my nails dyed purple from the primer. But the first day I had everything set up and my controller programmed, I went out in the morning with my tea and watched the drip turn on all by itself. I can't even tell you how excited I was.

So now, instead of dealing with horrible hoses, my 12 raised beds are drip irrigated with ½ gallon inline emitters on 1/2-inch tubing. Each bed has a shut off so I can turn it off independently when fallow or approaching harvest.

My fruit trees have been significantly upgraded by the drip hose evenly distributing water. And, now that I have designated points of connections to guide me, I can start designing and planting the other areas of the homestead.