Installing a Drip Irrigation System for Raised Beds 💦 (Before & After)

What's up everyone? Kevin here. So today we are going to redo and perfect the drip system in the front yard. As you can see, all the beds are ready for planting. I got to get irrigation set up. So I've got a bunch of new fittings from Drip Depot, who actually did the donation for the last time we did this years and years ago. So we're going to update it for the modern era for 2020, make some adjustments. I'll go over what went wrong or what I didn't like so much about the way I did it last time and then how I'm fixing it for this time. So here's an example bed of the system that I have right now. You could see we have a little one by one or two by two as the header row that I hammered in the main line into. And then I've got quarter inch drip coming out that I just secured at the end with a stake that just goes into the ground. Now I think it's an okay setup, but what I prefer and what I'm changing it to is it's going to have a header row and a footer row. So there'll be an end row of main line right over here with some end caps. And I'm going to switch this out to drip tape and not drip line because I like the flow rate a little bit better and I like the performance a little bit better. Each of the beds also has an on off. So if I wanted to, let's say cap this bed off because it's got enough water but I needed to irrigate the rest, I could go ahead and do that. But what I don't like about how I did it is I think this should be moved to down here so it doesn't take up any of the space on the header row. So I'm going to have to cut new main line and pop these off and move them down to here. So this is what it looks like when you're pulling out of an old sprinkler system. You have to connect it to the sprinkler itself, which is right there. It runs up vertically into a 90 degree connector into a filter to make sure no particulate matter gets caught, goes down into a pressure regulator at 15 PSI and then it goes into the main line. And the main line is what you're pulling out of over here, let's say, to connect into a bed. All right, so that's the basic setup. That's the basic logic. Now what I need to do is go ahead and take one of these beds as a test and construct the new header row with four lines of drip tape. And then I need a footer row with some end caps on it. And then I also need to take our on off valves and move them lower so they're not taking up any of the space on the header row. So we're going to go ahead and construct one, see how it works, see if we can correct any inefficiencies before we extend it out to all 14 beds in the front yard. Now before you even buy any drip equipment at all, you have to calculate the total gallon per hour output of the system to make sure that the parts and pieces you're buying, especially the main line tubing will support that. So for example, my half inch main line tubing can support a system up to 200 gallons per hour of output. And what that means is I have to add up every single length of drip tape, sum all of that up and then calculate if that's going to put out more or less than 200 gallons per hour. So in my case, I think I had somewhere around 225 feet of drip tape and I have four inch emitters. And so I say, okay, well then that's going to be 225 times three because that's going to be four, four, four adds up to a foot. So 225 times three, 675. And the emitters are a quarter gallon an hour, right? So 0.25 gallon an hour. So 675 divided by four is less than 200 cause 800 divided by four would be 200. And so I knew I was safe for this system. That's really one of the most important pieces. After that you can mix and match and you can do all sorts of 90 degree rotations and on and off valves and T splits and whatever, as long as you're under the total amount of gallons per hour output that the whole system can support. So I've got my on off valve there, a 90 degree into our three lines of drip connected over here to a footer row. And so just to show you that again on a more classically shaped bed, you're pulling out with a T connector. You've got your on off, if you so choose to want to turn off the irrigation here. I went 90 to 90 into a header piece of wood to keep it nice and stable into four lines with a footer row. And then we've replicated that here, here, here, over here, and then over here and here. And then all the way over here too. And this is a really long one. So this is three lines of tape all the way down to there. So the rest of the system is all set up. It took a while to make sure that every end cap was properly tightened. All of the drip tape connectors were properly tightened and I had a couple leaks that I finally plugged up. But the entire system works and oh my gosh, it's so insane how convenient it is to turn one thing and have all of these beds here as well as the beds over here and even the long bed over here all set up on drip irrigation. All right, so turns out, I guess I didn't need to install the drip irrigation anyways because we just had basically a flash flood here in San Diego. But I'm just kidding. It's going to be nice to have this. What I wanted to do was answer some of your frequently asked questions. So on Instagram I said, Hey, if you have any drip irrigation questions, drop them and I will do my best to answer them. So as we're hanging out in our rainy front yard, let's go ahead and roll through some of these. So Amelia Bretzing, she says, is the water pressure consistent in every bed? And it wouldn't be if you didn't do that calculation that we mentioned earlier in the video. It sometimes can take a little bit of time for water to permeate through the entire system. But as soon as you get to that endpoint of the system and water starts coming out of all the emitters, the water pressure is consistent. The only reason it wouldn't be is if you actually didn't calculate correctly and you are under pressure for the entire system. Giraffe Kerry says feeling overwhelmed on where to start with drip irrigation. I actually was too. So what I did is I went to Drip Depot. This was early on like maybe three years ago and I just emailed their customer support and I was like, Hey, can you help me out? I've never done drip irrigation before. And surprisingly because customer service sometimes is like pretty bad. Surprisingly they just helped me design the whole system, which is pretty crazy. And actually Jack over at Drip Depot helped me troubleshoot some of the calculations that I was doing for this system that you see behind me. So that's where I started Drip Depot and they are the people who donated all the fittings for this video. So first of all, I would have used them anyways, but second of all, I just wanted to give them a nice shout out. Oregon Dana on Instagram says, curious about the approximate cost of your setup. Yeah, so this one would have cost somewhere around $200, $250. And what you're getting with that is all the fittings you need to set it up. Your 90 degrees, your T's, your end caps, your takeoffs from the main line into the drip tape connectors and the main line tubing as well as the drip tape. And I actually have plenty left over so I can do any troubleshooting I need. I can replace something if it breaks. I can extend the system. And so for me that's a pretty good deal. I mean, I know that's a little expensive, but to do one action, just turn the nozzle on and I can even put this on an automatic timer if I want to and have the entire garden watered. It's well worth it for me, especially if I go on a vacation or something like that. Shot by a girl says, I would love to know the drip distances and drip rate for different applications. That's a good question. So for me I chose four inch distance between each emitter on the drip tape and I chose a relatively low flow rate of a quarter gallon an hour. So let's say you have four feet right there and that's going to be roughly 12 emitters. Yeah, 12 emitters. Yeah, 12 emitters. Mathematics, it's hard. So 12 times four because I have four lines of four feet. That means you've got 48 emitters, which means you divide that again by four, cause it's a quarter gallon an hour and you're back to 12 gallons in an hour. So this bed will put out 12 gallons of water over an hour if I run it. That's too much. I don't need that. So let's say the bed needs roughly around three gallons every time I water it. Well then I only need to water it for about a quarter of an hour or 15 minutes. So I can turn this entire system on for about 15 minutes and I know I've put three gallons of water into every single bed. Bethann Boxtel asks, when you add compost or mulch, do you cover the lines or do you keep them on top? So I'll be covering them. That's just buried drip. That's a very common application. It actually helps preserve the drip tape because it's not going to be exposed to the sun and there's no issues with clogging or anything like that provided you have no leaks in the system and no like little tears or anything like that. So actually buried drip is probably the better way to go if you can. Okay. So and Saver asks, which is best soakers for the whole bed or emitters focused more on the plant root? Yeah, that's a good question. I almost think it's like a personal style type of thing. As long as your plants are well established in the bed, this style of application will be completely fine because then the roots will be out far enough to reach any sort of pockets of water that the emitters are throwing out. If you really are worried about that or you like to direct so into your bed, sometimes you may want to do soaker instead because that puts out a consistent stream of water across the whole soaker. So that's really just depending on the way that you do it. I like to grow my plants over in my seed starting area and then transplant them in. And so for me, it makes a lot of sense to go ahead and do this application, especially because if I feel that maybe the drip isn't quite solving the job early on in the plant's life, I can just go ahead and hand water until they're established and then I know they're good to go. Garden Soak Out says, why do you need a filter? Where did you find the inline filter? So again, the filter I found at Drip Depot, it's part of the standard sprinkler retrofit kit, but you need it because if there's any particulate matter that's coming out somehow, like it gets in the water line or whatever, you need it to be caught before it goes into your main line of drip system because then you're just going to clog it and you won't actually know where it is. So if it, it's better to get caught there rather than to go into your main line and get caught somewhere in the potentially hundreds of feet of mainline tubing that you don't know how to fix it because you don't know where it is. Beloved Hanada, is the irrigation main line the same as a normal water line? No, it's not. It's a separate type of tubing that's used specifically for irrigation. You can buy it in different diameters. I bought a half inch main line, which has a 200 gallon per hour output. So the whole system has to be under 200 gallons per hour for good water pressure. Mad Midget says, is there a way to do this for a handful of 10 gallon pots? Yeah, totally. There is. What you would do is you would punch into the main line and you'd pull like a quarter inch drip line out and you'd have a drip spike. So you would spike it into your into your grow bag or your fabric bag and then it would just put a targeted amount of water directly in the root zone. And so I actually might do that because I might be putting some grow bags out here. In fact, I will be putting some grow bags out here and I can punch into my main line and get a drip manifold and like maybe, let's even, I have 10 grow bags. I could go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and pull in and just spike in. And actually I have a whole video on someone who did exactly this. If you look up on my channel, uh, growing in 35,000 milk crates, there's a guy in New York City at River Park, New York. He grows for a professional chef and he did this in thousands of milk carts. He did exactly that method. So check that video out. Okay. Our final question is from Crispy Crackling Pop. Is it hard to set up for someone who is maybe not so great with things like this? Yeah. I mean, yes and no, right? So the way I think about it is like if you ever played with Legos, that's exactly what you're doing. The hardest part about this is figuring out the math behind the system before you buy everything. Like we've talked about a couple of times already in this video. Once you know that the system is going to support whatever you build, then it's really just putting it all together. I mean, this design is not even that common I don't think. Like you don't actually need the footer rows that I have because really all the footer row is doing is just acting as a way to keep everything nice and tidy. It's not helping the flow of anything. And the only reason I did that is because I didn't want to put a spike at the end of each of the drip tape and just adhere it into the soil. I figured that's four points of disorder rather than just tying it all together and having a nice grid sit down. So it's really not that hard. You just kind of have to play around with it. And honestly, when you get your drip, you can just kind of mix and match and like lay things out and put it all together and see if it makes sense. Just like I did. I put this one down and I said, Oh, it makes sense. And I made some tweaks. And then I just applied it to the rest of the whole bed. Drip irrigation is super, super fun. I don't know what it is. I just, I think it's very pleasing to look at. Obviously it's handy in the garden. So I hope this was helpful. If it was, feel free to shoot a like, feel free to shoot a follow, feel free to shoot a question down below. And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.