Drip Irrigation for Home Gardens

By

MawMawAnne

My husband works in construction and comes home with many 5 gallon plastic buckets (paint, sheetrock mud, etc.). Be sure to use non-toxic products & containers. We clean them out and he drills a very small hole in the side about 1 inch from the bottom. We gather rain water from our gutters into large barrels (also gathered from construction & other sites), then transfer it 5 gallons at a time to the buckets, and place them near our plants with the hole feeding the water toward the plants. A small hole can make the water last about a week. The hole can't be drilled too close to the bottom of the bucket or debris will plug it too easily. Dump the debris out each time when you fill the 5 gallon buckets with water. This helps get your new plants establised & can help water in summer.

By RoseMary (Guest Post)

We live a mountain rural area of Colorado. We have tried the drip method, however, we had it attached to two 220 gallon tanks which we had to fill in town 30 miles away and must be gravity fed to the plants. Too much for our well pump to handle the drip method. The gravity method was not very good, we have tried three years in a row, the plants did not get enough water because the drippers got plugged or the hose got plugged ( we tried different ways to set it up each year). Some of the plants got too much water because the dripper was broken somehow. We have gone back to the hand watering method. We have up to 10 rows at a time with each 50 feet.

I'm sure the drip method if fed by regular pressure works great. We do not have that available where we are. Isreal has done some great things with the drip method and that's why we decided to try it. Happy gardening. RoseMary