Drip irrigation is one of the most effective ways to irrigate a wide variety of plantings around your yardscape. Irrigating only where is needed makes sure the crop gets water efficiently, suppresses weeds, and reduces water use.
PVC pipe, along with the readily available assortment of fittings, adapters, and valves makes it EASY to construct an economical and effective system. While this is not an “off the shelf” system, it uses “off the shelf” parts with no modification. SEE THE MATERIALS LIST BELOW FOR MORE DETAIL.
Because this is a low-pressure system, only select parts, such as the distribution manifold, and the supply valve assembly, are glued together. All the rest or simply pressed together. It’s simple and effective, and much appreciated when it comes to installing, taking down, and storing the system.
This episode features a multi-row irrigation system, perfect for row crops in your food plot. It’s easy to construct, is modular, can be set up in various ways, and lasts for years. It’s easy to set up and take down, allowing a clear area for cultivation, tilling, or plowing.
It’s also readily adapted to raised beds and grow boxes by shortening the lengths of the pipes and constructing a simple distribution manifold.
CHECK THIS OUT! One of the best features of this system is that you can set it up, turn on your water briefly, and the soil will be clearly marked EXACTLY where to plant. Different sets of pipes, with various hole spacing and patterns, allow you to install the right one for the crop you are planting. Plus, you can change the type of spacing, as you continue down a single row.
DirtFarmerJay walks you through some different approaches, lessons learned, and a few techniques that assure you get great results. Keep in mind that this is an imprecise system. You are essentially directing water where you want it to "leak" out! You will need to balance the system once you set it up and flow water into it.
Areas that are getting too much water can be raised a bit (on a piece of brick, wood, or a pile of soil under the pipe). "Starved" areas can be lowered a bit to increase flow - but do this ONLY after raising the high flow areas. On long row runs, you can connect two adjacent rows at the end of the run to also balance the pressure. Lastly, if one side of the whole system is getting more water than the other, you can balance the main manifold itself by installing ball valves to re-distribute water. You'll need to experiment a bit!
MATERIALS NEEDED: To make your system just as you've seen it in this episode, you'll need:
* a drill and 1/16" (1.5 mm) bit * 3/4" PVC pipe (we prefer schedule 40, although lighter gauge schedule 20 will work) * matching couplings, caps, and tees * PVC pipe glue (use ONLY on the permanent manifold, not the row pipes) * As many 3/4" schedule 40 PVC glue in valves as you need to balance the manifold * 3/4" PVC male adapters (depending on whether you are using slip or threaded components) * Some type of connection to the water supply - this can be a slip glue by hose female thread adapter, or for a more permanent but seasonal connection, a slip x slip PVC union can be used
A special acknowledgment to Matt Bunkall, who presented this system and approach during one of our local Master Garden Association meetings. It forever changed the way we do crop irrigation. Thanks, Matt!
When it comes to garden irrigation, JUST DO IT YOURSELF!
Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here with DirtFarmerJay.com. Well, gardening season is here and it's a great
time to plant a food plot and I hope you're going to do that. But if you do, you need a great drip
irrigation. Well, stay tuned and I'll show you an inexpensive PVC do-it-yourself system that'll put
the water right where you need it. Stay tuned. All right, so let's go ahead and look at what it
takes to build one of these surface mounted systems. I'll get into a little bit of detail
shots in a few moments, but let's just give you an overview. As you can see, this system is
surface mounted. It just lays on top of the furrow rows or the hills. And what I do is I create
a basic manifold that is a straight line with a set of T's except out on the end there's elbows.
And I space these three foot apart. That is a great distance, general purpose distance,
even with corn. And by using little stub pipes like this, I can shut off one of the outlets
in case I'm going to put in vine crops such or like watermelons, cantaloupe, those kind of things
where I don't want to tie the spacing. This is all this section, as you can see because of the blue,
that manifold is glued together. These are simply press fit in. This is a low pressure system,
so other than the manifold and the valve system and that sort of thing,
you don't need to glue it together. This is just simply pressed into place. These lines that are
teeing off, which have holes in them, which I'll give you more detail in a few minutes,
are simply pressed in as well. Let's get a close up here of the supply line. This section right to
this valve, or excuse me, this union, is what's left at the end of the season. When I take the
system out, what you're going to have is these will be taken out of the manifold. This part will
be lifted off. That's what's left. And then I bucket it. There's a stake right here to protect
it from tilling. When it comes time to set up again, I set in the manifold without the pipes
and then simply screw this all together again. And now it is ready to operate.
A standard inline valve like this allows me to regulate the volume and somewhat the pressure
because it is a low pressure system. So whatever, the more lines you have and more outlets,
the more volume of water you're going to need. And we'll show you this in operation a little bit,
but pretty basic. You simply have T's, L's, plugs, couplings that put everything together
and it lays on the surface. We'll show it here in just a moment. Let's go ahead and take a look
at how you drill the pipes and a tip that I learned to make sure you don't end up with
water shooting direction you don't want it to go. Let's take a look. All right, let's talk about
the drip sections themselves made out of PVC pipe. Because it is PVC pipe, it's easy to cut either
with a handsaw or PVC pipe cutter. I even use my own chop saw sometimes very quickly to cut these
pipes. A couple of things I want you to notice very quickly. Number one, you can use in this
application the schedule 20 pipe. This has a burst strength around 200 PSI. As you can see,
it's a little bit thinner than you may be used to seeing. This is the heavier gauge pipe that is
most standard used out of schedule 40. And I think it has about 480 PSI pressure. So you can use
either one. I prefer that I become a fan of this now simply because it's so much lighter
and it's less expensive and you don't require high pressure to do this system. All right,
when you are going to do this, I want to give credit to one of my friends in the Master Gardener
group. Matt Bunkle presented this idea to our Master Gardeners group a couple years ago and
it's become my go-to way now to surface irrigate garden crops because it only puts the water where
you need it, suppresses weeds by starving water out, and is a more efficient use of water. Less
water exactly where it's needed is what a good drip system does. But how do you do this with these
pipes? Well, if you take a close-up shot right here, you can see there's a triple set of holes
right here. And if we go down the pipe, you'll see another one. These are about 30 inches apart.
This particular setup was for zucchinis or for melon crops. So you end up with a triple irrigation
drip but in the hills or in bigger spacings. And so you can make custom pipes like this. You can
also shorten them up if you're putting them in garden boxes like we have eight-foot garden boxes.
So you can modify and you can certainly use half-inch pipe if you like as well. All right,
so that's one type. Look at here. This one, this is last year. As you can see, it hasn't been even
cleaned up. These are set at six-inch holes right down the line. This is what I use for watering
corn. And Matt Bunkle gave me this idea. The ones he uses for corn, he just spray-painted his yellow
so it's really easy when you store them to go out and grab a bundle of them and set them up
and then get going with it. Now, here's something you need to know. If you just willy-nilly start
drilling and after you just measure your length or your pitch distance between holes, there's no
way you're going to keep that line straight. And what'll happen is you'll lay down the pipe
and the water will be coming out the side over here but it'll start coming up higher and higher.
And now you got water spraying all over. You want the water to kind of cascade out the side
of the pipe onto the areas where you want to irrigate or right at the base of the plants.
So you've got to get everything in a straight line. How do you do that? Well, here's a fast,
easy way to do that. And that is simply grab three pipes at a time, tape them tight like this.
When you tape them, it's possible to get them twisted like this and you don't want to do that.
Once you tape them, line this up, sight down and make sure that it's all level. Then take
yourself a marker like this and simply in the joint line, draw a line down the side.
And I draw it so that it goes on both sides so I can mark out two pipes at a time.
And now I have a line in which to make sure that as long as I drill on that line,
I'm going to end up with all the holes being the same thing. Now, one of the things that you can do
on these pipes, if let's suppose on this one I draw a double line, I can actually drill two
sides of the same pipe. And I'll show you that in just a few minutes on my onions because they're a
furrow crop spaced four inches apart on a hill about 16 inches apart. So I can irrigate from
the same source pipe, but water coming out both sides. So you can use this system
to mark that as well. So that's quick, doesn't create any extra setup and you can just use the
material you've got, simple tape and a sharpie pen. So let's talk about drilling the holes.
Surprisingly, the only thing you need is a 16 inch drill bit. That does fine. If you put out
a big hole, it's going to put out a lot more pressure, a lot of volume. You'll end up with a
big puddle of water. This does surprisingly well. If you've got a crop that needs more in one area,
like you saw a few moments ago, then put a double or triple row or something there to get more
water out of the same place. So when it comes time to drill these, you can just pick the point
you're going to drill. There's on the line right there and it'll drill really easy and boom,
it is done. And then I would have marked these out in the distance, depending on the crop,
12 inches apart, 4 inches apart, 3 inches, whatever it is, and then mark those up and
then write on them what they're for. And that way I can customize. It's very modular.
There's one other cool thing you can do with this. Let's suppose you're doing a 30 foot run of these
pipes. The first third of the run of the 10 foot could be one crop. Then you can change to another
pipe that's got something set up for wider spacing or narrower spacing. It's very modular,
very interchangeable, very inexpensive. It's hard to go wrong. Well, would you like to see it in
operation? I thought so. Let's take a look and I'll show you what it looks like. All right, we now turn
on the system. And as you can see right here, this is a double system where it's watering the onions
in this furrow, puddling really nice. And it'll flood irrigate all this and just fill that up.
And you can see it runs softly. It's very nice. Now, before we film this, I just went in and
threw in one of my corn ones, a triple set, in one of these areas on the manifold by pulling out
the short plug, throwing in one here. And these are last year's. I haven't even had a chance to
clean them out. So if there's a plugged one, I just use one of my 16th inch bits, go through and
punch out the little plugs as you're going to get dirt and grit in there from time to time.
And you can clean those up. You can also rotate them. But as you can see, these are drooling water
very nicely right where. So I would plant the corn off to this case, the left, right where that water
is sitting. And I can go down there and rotate that, get that line really nice and straight.
And here's a really cool trick that Matt taught me. You simply turn off the water, let it set for
a bit. Now the irrigation system itself is marked where you need to plant the seeds. You just put
them right where the watermark is right there and it's going to get water from then on. It's a great
little system. Pretty cool, huh? Well, there you have it. A great do-it-yourself drip system.
If you have a great idea like this you'd like to pass on to your fellow viewers,
won't you post it in the comments below? And if we make an episode out of it,
we'll make sure to give you credit for it. If you found the video to be helpful,
won't you like it? And better yet, please subscribe to our channel. And when you do,
ring the bell so you'll be immediately notified when a video goes up. Hey, thanks for watching
this episode today. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.
