A Simple & (Almost) Automatic Watering Setup

Looking for a cheap, easy-to-set-up automatic watering system for your garden? Here’s how to do it…

Tired of lugging heavy watering cans around your garden? Or how about standing out in the garden for hours holding a spray nozzle, trying to evenly water all of your beds? And if you set up a sprinkler, you end up wasting tons of water to evaporation, as well as soaking your plants’ leaves more than the ground.

A drip watering system solves all of these problems, and a basic system is super easy and cheap to install! If you have a medium-to-large garden, it’s a must. But even a small garden can benefit from drip irrigation.

I used one length of soaker hose to cover my entire garden when I only had a tiny apartment garden. It saved me tons of time and effort, and I only had to set it up once at the beginning of the season, then just hook up the hose to it for a couple of hours whenever the garden needed water.

The article below shares some helpful tips for setting up your own watering system. This works great for home gardeners, as it is movable to suit your garden’s changing needs, it’s easy to set up, costs very little, and best of all, it’s almost automatic if you follow these tips – all you’ll have to do is turn it on!

Part 1) Hose bib to hose (and everything in between)

We started with our hose bib and first attached a hose splitter so we could still use that hose for other purposes without having to detach the system.

Then, we attached a manual timer. BEST $10 INVESTMENT EVER! I cannot tell you how many times I turned on my garden water, only to run out 3 hours later cursing and realizing that once again, I had flooded everything.

Next comes the hose, or if you’re health conscious like me, a water filter. The reason we added a water filter was to filter out any harmful contaminants as well as chlorine. A garden is a living, thriving mini-ecosystem of microbes, and they don’t take too kindly to chlorinated water... (If you’re using rainwater to water, you may skip this, but in that case you may wish to purchase a cheap pump to provide pressure, unless you have a good gravity feed from your rain tank to the garden.)

After that, we attached our main hose.

Part 2) Splitting the water flow into sections

This part is also really simple. We attached a four way hose splitter so we could control the flow into different areas…. You can adjust each spigot to your desired water level. You definitely need a four way hose splitter!

Part 3) Use soaker hoses to water your plants.

The best part about soaker hoses is that they attach perfectly to your four way splitter because they have hose attachments on their ends. They also do a great job of slowly releasing water. We like to lay down the soaker hoses, and use these loop stakes to hold them down.

50 foot soaker hoses seem to work well in an 8×3 raised garden bed. You’ll loop them up and down covering as much as the area as possible….

………………………………………..

Read the full article at WeedEmAndReap.com

Image Source: Weed Em And Reap

Rose S.

An avid gardener since childhood, I love sharing my passion for gardening with others! I have gardened in a number of different climates and settings, from large fenced garden plots, to tiny patio and container gardens, and I firmly believe that everyone can learn to grow at least some of their own food - no matter where you live. Growing your own food can help you take control of your own health and food supply, and there has never been a better time to get started!


More to Explore

2 thoughts on “A Simple & (Almost) Automatic Watering Setup
  • Rose S.

    Thanks for your comment Patricia! If you click through to the source article via the link at the bottom, there are a few more pictures there that may be helpful…

  • Patricia

    This article needs to include lots of pictures and or video to show the setting clearly.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *