Written by: Melody Davis, Master Gardener Apprentice

My first experience with drip irrigation was when my parents first entered semi-retirement. My mother has always had a wonderful appreciation for beauty, and I wanted her to have a lot of beauty to enjoy on her patio.

I bought pots and plants and made delightful combinations for her enjoyment, but the watering of those pots kept getting overlooked. With inconsistent water, the pots quickly went from beautiful to pitiful.

Then one day I was searching for something in a local hardware store and stumbled onto the drip irrigation section. My eyes landed on a patio irrigation kit; everything you needed was in the box, and all my hopes and dreams for Mom to have a patio full of beauty were completely resuscitated in that moment! The whole kit was under $20, and Mother’s Day was right around the corner, so I went to work. I bought hanging pots and standing pots and as I was setting the whole system up, I found it was really fun! For just a little bit of money I had solved my watering problem and brought mom a whole lot of pleasure. I had to tweak the system a little bit by switching out and adding heads until every pot was getting the water it needed. Then I added an automatic water timer and from there on we simply sat and sipped our coffee together enjoying the beauty of the plants and flowers day after day.

A few years later we were preparing for vacation and I was mulling over what to do with my freshly planted outdoor pots. Not only did I hate to ask family to stop by to water the plants daily, but no one loves your pots like you do! The day before we left, remembering my experience with Mom’s patio, I rummaged in the garage and found the leftovers of her patio watering kit. I had to purchase a couple extra pieces, but with the exception of the timers, drip irrigation parts are extremely inexpensive. I gathered all my pots together, strung up an irrigation line between them all and had a system set up in no time. We returned a couple weeks later to happy, healthy, thriving plants. And I asked myself a question: “Why don’t I just take a little time and set up a system for all my pots, in their proper places, so I don’t have to water every single day?”I LOVE watering pots, but we all have busy days and they seemed to be thriving better on the extremely consistent watering schedule they had been on.

In a couple of hours, I was able to set up a watering system that effectively watered eight different pots every single day. Now instead of standing over the pots with my hose guessing when they had had enough, I could spend my time peacefully enjoying the flowers themselves knowing I had a system in place delivering the water they needed.

Now I only had one set of potted plants situated with some other scattered plants in the back yard that were not irrigated. Once again, the day before we headed out on vacation, at dusk, I enlisted my husband’s help, and we hurriedly ran a drip systemover to that section of plants and pots. When we got home, I refined it and they have all been thriving ever since.

If you’ve never used a drip system, I’ll give you the most basic of primers, but I have found the instructions on all these kits to be extremely user friendly.

The beauty of these systems is that they hook up to a simple outdoor faucet.As long as you have that, you’re set.  I still want a water hose available, so we always attach one of these faucet splitters to the existing faucet first. One side will service your drip system and the other is for your garden hose. A little roll of plumbing tape costs just around a dollar and together with good washers, it will help you keep all your connections tight and drip free.

TIMERS

These timers are battery operated, so they are completely free standing at the faucet. You can set how often you want them to water, usually anywhere from every six hours to every seven days. In the heat of summer, I sometimes set my pots on every twelve hours so they’regettingmoisture both morning and evening for just a few minutes, especially those hanging pots that really tend to dry out in the windy heat.

If you have a lot of things you want to connect to a system, or things that have very different watering needs, you can purchase timers with up to four outlets. This will allow you to water more plants as well as allow you to customize the watering schedule for each outlet.

WATERING SETUP

A patio setup will come with a filter, ¼ inch hose tubing adapter, and pressure regulator along with a variety of connectors, heads, and ¼ inch tubing. Those sound complicated, but they aren’t. Just connect the filter, adapter and regulator as the picture in the kit will show you, and then connect ¼ inch tubing to this. (If you think ahead, lay your roll of tubing out in the sun for about 30 minutes or so; it will make it so much more manageable.) Unroll a length of tubing from the faucet to your first pot. You DON’T want to be tripping over your tubing, so as you unroll it, remember to leave plenty of length so you can stabilize it to the ground with the stakes provided and cover it with dirt or mulch where someone might walk. The tubing is very inexpensive, so be generous with your lengths, you can trim it down to size later.

A variety of irrigation heads are available. Most patio kits provide 1-2 gallon per hour (gph) heads and possibly some adjustable-rateheads. The type and numberof heads needed for each pot will be determined by a combination of common sense and trial and error for folks like you and me.

A drip system drips, that’s very different from dispensing a couple of inches of water from a hose all at one time. I have some smaller pots that I put a single verbena in each year. Those pots fill up with flowers, but I’m only irrigating one root system so one or two low output heads are fine.  I also have larger pots with several plants in them and for those I create a circle of tubing with four 1 gph heads distributed evenly around the pot and one extending into the middle of the circleso all the soil gets moistened as it irrigates. In theory, if I water that pot for fifteen minutes it will slowly receive about five quarts of water each irrigation cycle.

The most basic watering heads are in line emitters(these are usually available in 0.5-2 gph), spot emitters (these come most commonly in 0.5-4 gph) and then there are adjustable heads with a knob you twist until it’s dripping to your satisfaction. I have one tiny pot of shamrocks I like to put on the porch for the summer and the adjustable head allows me to adjust it down to a single drop barely coming out so that it doesn’t get flooded while being watered with  the larger pots. There are many other options, but these are the most common and practical.

Keeping track of all the little parts can be frustrating,so a small parts organizer like this is a must if you plan to work often with drip systems. They are again, very inexpensive, and they make your grown-up,productive, building hobby so much more enjoyable. A good lighter is also a great help to slightly warm that plastic when inserting heads and connectors, and don’t forget a good pair of scissors or a utility knife for cutting the line.

These are my tips from several years of experience with these systems:

1. LOOK at your plants often. Now that you aren’t standing over that plant daily with a hose, it’s easy to miss any developing problems ranging from a malfunction in your watering system to bugs eating your precious plants!
2. Every fall when you winterize everything else, disconnect your timer from the faucet, remove the batteries and discard them, and store the timer inside. I like to put a piece of heavy duty tin-foil over the part of my drip system that attaches to the timer so that over the winter my line stays nice and clean. You do NOT want dirt, leaves, or bugs getting into that water line!
3. Every spring, put FRESH batteries inyour timer. You’ll thank yourself.
4. Every spring, when you set up your system, check every single head to make sure they are functioning properly. This is much more difficult to do once your pots are full of plants.
5. Place a layer of mulch in your pots over your lines and heads. Not only will this make them more attractive, but all of your water will be directed downward into the soil rather than blowing in the wind and the mulch will help your soil retain its moisture. I personally like the guerilla hair mulch.
6. Keep your timer receipts. They are your greatest investment in the system, and we have found the manufacturers to be really great about replacing them if they break within their warranty period.

If you enjoyed Legos, Tinker toys, or other building toys as a kid, you’ll really enjoy putting together a drip system. There are lots of connector pieces, elbows, t-joints, and end to end pieces allowing you to configure your system however you need to. If you put a hole in the wrong place, you’recovered; there are goof plugs to fill that hole. Not enough irrigation? Not a problem, just pop off or cut off your current head and insert one with a higher gph rating. You simply attach the desired size of  heads where you need them in the pot, then select what connector you need to extend your ¼ inch line to the next pot and keep going until you have everything covered. When you’re finished setting up, always do a trial run and see if everything is being watered adequately:  adjust as needed. That’s it! Now, you can relax and enjoy your garden.