New Irrigation System

Since the furrow irrigation hasn't been working so well to germinate our small seeded crops like carrots and lettuce, we've decided to jump headfirst into drip irrigation. It is expensive, and somewhat more of a hassle but I think in the long run it will actually be less work. I was spending way too much time hauling hoses around to do furrow irrigation.

Drip irrigation consists of small plastic hoses that run the full length of each bed. They have a hole every foot that drips out water very slowly. The advantage is that you get to control the amount of water to each bed since there is a little valve for each bed, and that the water is distributed uniformly and very slowly. We bought all our irrigation components from Irrigation Mart in Ruston, LA. In case you are wondering they also build small systems if you want to try this method on your home garden.

One of the more expensive parts of the system is the filters which we have to have because we pump out of a pond. The dirt would clog up the emitters if we didn't filter it out. If you are going to do this in the city, you don't need the filters because the city water is already clear.

The filter system is built around a swimming pool sand filter. It required a lot of plumbing to hook it all up, but as you can see it works! This is the first test, you can see the water coming out of the open hose. It isn't hooked up to the drip lines yet, I was just making sure that it wouldn't explode.

We haven't had significant rain for about a month so we were getting pretty desperate. The funny thing is that while it has been fairly warm and dry for the last couple of weeks, the day I set up the system it decides to sleet, rain, and snow. There wasn't very much precipitation, just enough to make it a little muddy. The snow sure was beautiful though!