How to Install Drip Irrigation in Raised Garden Beds (Using Drip Tape)

Hey friends, Deanna here with Homestead and Chill, and today I want to show you exactly how we just set up a drip irrigation system for all of our raised garden beds. So this video is going to take you through everything you need to know from the supplies to the step-by-step process to feel confident in setting up a drip irrigation system of your own for your raised beds. In this particular system we did use drip tape, but I'm also going to go through a few different variations that you can use if you prefer to use regular standard drip irrigation tubing and emitters rather than drip tape. And so if you're not familiar with what drip tape is, it's essentially kind of like a flattened version of regular drip tubing and it has drip emitters pre-installed for you. We chose to use drip tape just because we found that we like the spacing that this offered. The drip emitters are installed every six inches, where some of the other types of drip tubing that you can buy that already has emitters installed for you, I found was more like nine inches or 12 inches or even 24 inches apart, which I think would be really great for a lot of other applications, especially if you're growing mostly larger plants like tomatoes or peppers or whatnot. But we also like to grow a lot of root veggies and more closely spaced plants in our garden beds, so I really like the fact that the drip tape offered us that six inch spacing. So the first thing that you're going to need to do is get a supply line or main water supply to every raised bed. And so before we get going, and I'll actually show you, you know, how to piece together this whole drip portion, I will show you how we ran PVC to all these raised beds. They actually come in right up here, but you can't see it because it's buried in soil, but I'll show you that. You can use PVC, other hard piping, or even the standard half inch black irrigation tubing running up into your beds as well. But I want everyone to keep in mind that we do live in a really mild climate here, so we don't get a lot of freezing conditions, and we also don't get very high heat during the summer. So we were able to get away with installing our PVC under just a few inches of gravel on top of the landscape fabric that we have installed in this area. However, in most climates and general best practice for installing irrigation lines is to bury it at least six inches, if not 12 to 18 inches deep, in a trench under the ground. So I just want you to keep that in mind and look into the best irrigation install practices for your climate before you get started. And so depending on where you're at in your garden install process, you have a few different options. It may be easiest to actually trench that pipe and do a little riser to where each raised bed is going to go before you even add your raised beds. However, if you already have raised beds in place, no worries. You can trench in under the side of the bed and have the irrigation come up inside and kind of concealed like we have it. Or you can even run pipe right up the outside of your raised bed and then down into the top kind of header area. So this can be applied to either new gardens or existing gardens just the same. All right, so here's a quick peek at the irrigation system in the raised beds before we actually fill them with soil. So as you can see, here is the PVC riser that we created just covered for now so that soil doesn't get in it when we actually put soil in the beds. And you can see I just poked a hole or cut a hole in the hardware cloth to feed that pipe down and under the side of the bed. The hardware cloth is there for gopher proofing. So then we just kind of burrowed under in the gravel. You could obviously do the same in soil. And then this riser is where the rest of the irrigation system will attach to in each bed. The main line that will feed each bed is going to go on the outside and be also kind of buried in the gravel there. And same deal on this side. Okay, so there are all the raised beds and we are doing the first steps of getting the drip irrigation set up to these guys today. So this little area here, we had already had the sprinkler valves and two stations that were just stubbed out and capped right here that we had installed for this purpose and hadn't used them yet. So we had dug this little area. It's going to go under our steel border here, if you can see that, under here. And then pop up and go over to the beds and then connect from there on down to all the beds. So it's going to be up to you folks to figure out, you know, exactly where your water supply comes in and how that's hooked up to your raised bed irrigation system. But I'll just give you a quick peek at what we have going on over here. So there is a solar powered controller box that operates six different systems.