Drip irrigation

Irrigation for pots hanging baskets and containers

Healthy plants in pots and containers can look stunning; they enhance patios and balconies with colour and can soften hard scaping areas. Pots and hanging baskets have a tendency to dry out very quickly and need to be watered on a daily basis in the summer. This is very easy to do when you have an automatic drip irrigation system.

The first thing to do is to make a simple drawing on which you plot the position of all the pots, hanging baskets and containers you want to water as you will need to lay tubing as close as you can to the containers. I should really start by explaining what products and different components you will need to purchase and I am presuming you have a water source you can link the system to.

1. Outdoor tap
2. Battery operated timer. This will screw directly on to the tap and have a ¾” male thread outlet
3. Tubing. This is usually black plastic pipe that takes the water to the pots. It comes in a number of different sizes, in the UK the most common sizes are 20 mm and 16 mm in diameter. 
4. Barb fittings. These fittings are used to extend the system or split the system and help you go around corners without kinking the pipe. 
5. Micro tube. This is a small pipe 4 mm in diameter that fits on to the 20 mm tubing and feeds the drippers or micro sprinklers
6. Sprinklers. There are lots of different types of drippers and sprinklers on the market and I will not go into too much detail in this Blog. If you need more information please feel free to ask.

7. Punch tool. This is used to make a hole in the tubing so that you can insert a barbed coupling into the tubing to connect the micro tubing.

Installing the drip irrigation

Lay the tubing from the tap to your pots, use the barb elbows to do around corners so that the tubing does not kink. You will need to cut the tube at the position of the corner and insert the elbow. To make it easier to insert the barbed fitting, dip the end of the tube in a saucepan of hot water. This will make the tube soft and the barbed fitting will be easier to push into the tube. Once the tubing is in place, punch a hole into the tubing next to each pot and insert the small barbed coupling onto which you will connect a length of micro tubing and connect the tubing to the micro sprinkler in the pot. Try and do this behind the pot so that it is less visible.

Please feel free to comment or ask questions I will be regularly adding information on all types of irrigation on my Blog. Feed back would be most appreciated. 

Flower bed Irrigation

The simplest way of watering your garden is by filling a watering can and pouring water on to your plants. Fortunately engineers and inventors quickly got bored of this very time consuming method and devised a whole range of irrigation systems.

Let’s start with the tap in our back garden onto which you can attach a whole array of timers and simple flower bed irrigation systems.

There are so many tap timers on the market and new ones coming available every season that I will not try and suggest which one is the best but do look out for the following features.

1.  Can you set the time at which timer turns on the water so that you can program it to come on during the night when there is more water pressure
2.  Frequency. - How often can you have the timer come on? Is it pre-set or can you decide?
3.  Duration. – Can you set the duration or are they pre-set
4.  Easy to programme.
5.  Does the timer have more than one port? In other words can you water 2 areas at different times for different lengths of time

Amico+ tap timer with 2 ports

Most tap timers have just one port and that is fine if you only want to water a flower bed that requires the same amount of watering. If you want to water a flower bed and hanging baskets the water requirement for the hanging baskets will probably be daily watering and the flower beds will could be only once a week so a dual port tap timer would be the one to go for.

Once you have decided on the tap timer, you will need to start designing your system and decide which materials you are going to use

Let’s start with a flower bed, with average good loam soil that you want to water when on holiday this summer. I would lay a drip line along the length of the bed 15 cm to 20 cm from the edge and space the lines about 30 cm apart this would give me 6 lines of drip line pipe. The drip line has drippers installed every 30 cm so this would give me adequate water coverage.

Now I need to know if there is enough water flow from the tap to supply all the drippers in the pipe. The flow rate of each dripper in a standard drip line is 2 litres water per hour. 

My calculation would be as follows 6 line x 5 meters = 30 m of drip line, and the drippers are spaced at 30cm along the pipe 30m divide by 0.3 meters = 100 drippers. Each dripper emits 2 litres per hour so 100 x 2 = 200 litres per hour. 

How much water does the tap give? To find this out you can measure the flow of your tap using a 10 litre bucket and measuring the time it takes to fill the bucket.

If it takes 30 seconds to fill a 10 litre bucket, divide 10 by 30 to get the number of litres per second, multiply by 60 for the litres per minute and multiply again by 60 for the litres per hour.

10: 30 = 0.333 litres per second, next 0.333 x 60 = 19.98 litres per minute and finally 19.98 x 60 = 1,198.8 litres per hour. This gives us plenty of water for our small flowerbed irrigation.

www.arcadiairrigation.co.uk

Drip irrigation system

Dripper insertid in a pipe

It’s often by chance that great discoveries are made, and that is exactly what happened back in early 1930 in the Negev desert in Israel. Simcha Blass, an engineer noticed a large tree growing in his back garden without being watered. Simcha dug the dry ground around the tree and found that water was leaking from a water pipe and the damp from the dripping water was reaching the roots of the tree. With the discovery of this leaking pipe the concept of drip irrigation was

born. Simcha Blass proceeded to experiment with different kinds of “leaking pipe”. He found that if he created very small holes through which the water could drip, they soon got blocked by the impurities in the water so he created a device using friction and pressure loss to leak drops of water at regular intervals.

In Australia Hannis Thill also worked on different methods of using plastic pipe to drip feed water to plants.

There are a number of different drip irrigation systems on the market, Netafim, the company that Simcha Blass created, manufacture large amounts of dripline. Dripline is a plastic pipe into which drippers are inserted. Other drip irrigation methods use drippers directly inserted into low-density polyethylene pipe using a punch tool and a barbed dripper or the dripper is attached to a micro pipe that then allows you to install the dripper near the base of the plant you want to water.

When and where to use drip irrigation

You can use drip irrigation in most situations, it is ideally suited to small areas, roof top gardens, balconies and large shrubberies or in agriculture where you have a high value crop planted in rows. If you install a drip line system  on a slope, it would be best to use self compensating drippers so that the water drips at the same rate at the top of the slope as at the bottom.  On a large area make sure you follow the contour of the area rather than up and down.

One of the main problems with drip irrigation is the emitters can get blocked especially if you are using water from a bore hole, well or rain water harvesting tank. in these instances you should use a filter. If you only have a few pots to water and mains water pressure is high, above 2 bar, you should install a pressure reducer to avoid the drippers popping out of the pipe.

At Arcadia Irrigation we stock dripper pipe and LDPE pipe that we supply to our irrigation contractor customers. sales@arcadiairrigation.co.uk

Irrigation; The beginning

5,000 years ago irrigation was used throughout the ancient world from Asia to North America. It was very different from what we have today. Ancient Egyptians used the flooding of the Nile to inundate their fields using dykes, the sediment left by the flooding made the soil very fertile. 

Inspection chambers servicing the drainage pipe that brings water
 from the mountains to the oasis. You can see in the distance more
inspection chambers.

In the Sahara desert, I saw elaborate canals that took water from a reservoir that was filled by a network of "drainage" pipes that filtered water from mountains miles away. 






Each  family owned one small outlet from the reservoir to water their fields. 

You can see the main canal being divided into smaller outlets at the bottom of the photo on the left. 

In many parts of the world animal powered irrigation was used to lift water from a well or canal using a chain of pots or a large leather bucket. With the advent of diesel engines, these ancient methods were replaced with more efficient ways of lifting water from wells and canals.

Primitive drip irrigation was first used in china during the first century BC! They buried unglazed clay pots filled with water. Modern drip irrigation was first used in 1860 in Germany when technicians experimented with buried irrigation  clay pipes. In the 1920 perforated pipes were used, later in Australia plastic pipes were used and modern drip irrigation was born.

Arcadia Irrigation: Thatch and aerate your lawn for healthier grass th...

Arcadia Irrigation: Thatch and aerate your lawn for healthier grass th...: Thatch is a tight layer of dead grass and stems that sits between the grass and soil. It’s often caused by over-fertilizing, shallow waterin...



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Thatch and aerate your lawn for healthier grass that lasts!

Thatch is a tight layer of dead grass and stems that sits between the grass and soil. It’s often caused by over-fertilizing, shallow watering and infrequent mowing. Thatch layers of more than 1 inch can restrict the movement of air, water, fertilizer and nutrients from getting to the roots. Read more - http://www.arcadiairrigation.co.uk/index.php?website=www.arcadiairrigation.co.uk&webpage=thatched-turf