Drip Irrigation

Some of us are using soaker hoses at the garden. This can lead to conflicts with other gardeners if your device is flooding the path or promoting weeds. (And we wouldn't want the city to start charging us for water!) The Internet has a lot of info about setting up a soaker hose in your vegetable gardening. A pressure-regulator is a good idea -- the soaker hoses operate at best at between 10 and 15 psi, but it's difficult to set the pressure just right and make sure it stays that way. Even a cheap timer can turn off the water for you if you forget. You can see how deeply you are watering by digging down with a shovel after 15 or 30 minutes, or you can measure the inches of water you catch with a shallow container under the hose. Vegetable roots generally are not that deep, if you have actually double-dug the garden your roots might reach down two spade-lengths. Plus our clay soil absorbs water so slowly that any extra will end up just running off.

So how long do you set your timers for? What kind of system are you using?

I would love to hear how deeply you are watering your vegetables -- and tell me how you are checking.

I'm actually hand watering this year, after having used a drip-irrigation system last year. I like having more control over where the water goes and I like to SEE how much water I am using. I use soaker hoses at home for my landscape, where I want the soil to dry out for several feet down between deep soakings.