Gardening With A Drip!

I have spent the better part of two days installing and testing a new drip system. I feel like the drip here... it makes me nuts when it takes this much time to put something in. The system was designed to irrigate the garden and send water to the chicken coops waterer.

So, after making a short 20ft trench about 12 inches deep, no worry about freezing here, otherwise 18 inches would be better, I dropped Schedule 40 PVC into the trench. The nice thing about S40 PVC is the wall of the pipe is thicker and less likely to puncture or break in the event I come back in a couple years and put a shovel into that same area...which I will.

I bought a simple little kit of RainDrip... Made in the USA!!!! WOW.. Small plastic parts? Made in the USA... you're kidding!? BUY RAINDRIP

http://www.raindrip.com/cms/

The kit was $20 and it came with 11 sprinklers and more tubing than a hospital. It was super easy to install, although the instructions were really sad... there weren't any. I got the drip system in and viola' it worked... and worked well. I will add and subtract from it as time passes... bubblers, soakers... etc.

The next thing I installed was a shut off valve for hooking up the automatic waterer for the chicken coop. The chickens are really messy with their water. Actually, they are gross. They have no mental switch that says - "Hey don't take a dump in the water!" Nothing happening here, so you need to mount the waterer up, above their need to scratch and higher than their rear-ends. This is a good tip. There food needs the same treatment.

At the end of the day, everything is working - new Toro Automatic Timer, it is a 6 station unit, drip system for a 30 x 15 garden and a spigot for the chickens. The total cost for it all was $104.00