I need to be able to water my strawberries from outside the cage. The cage is quite large, containing 12, 2.5mx1.5m beds.
I thought I could rig up a system for each bed using a loop of soaker hose attached to a 5 litre container which can be filled from the outside path. Will there be enough pressure to 'soak'?
If you hold the container up high enough you should get a bit of water out at about 1psig. Would probably be easier to just use a sprinkler can or a makeshift one. Good luck. How's the weather in the UK?
We're getting temps in the low nineties F recently here in SE Texas. We're also getting enough rain not to have to run the soaker hoses.
George
I found it did not work for me. You may want to look up Ollas on the web. They are basically a gallon container with holes in the bottom. You set then on the surface, or more commonly bury them a few inches deep in the bed.
It would be an easy matter to run some tuning from outside into the Ollas. Simple and cheap. gl
So you want to evenly apply 5 liters of water to each 2.5m x 1.5m bed.
I would think that a drip system would be your only hope. A soaker hose is designed for normal household water pressure, so you would not have enough pressure from a bucket to operate a ordinary soaker hose.
The problem with a drip system is that it is inefficient because a large portion of the water will simply evaporate before reaching the plant roots. A system that might work would be a hollow watering stake buried next to each plant with each stake fed from a hose from the bucket. This would allow gravity-fed water to more directly reach the plant roots. This could be expanded to a perforated water pipe pattern buried at slightly below root depth with filler pipes to the surface.
My Dad used to drill holes in one inch galvanized piping and put one alongside a watermelon plant. He filled the pipe twice a day and grew humongous melons. He tried it with a banana squash and the thing looked like a log and was still meaty with a few seeds. He was retired then so he had plenty of time to play.
Soaker hoses are designed for far lower pressure than most systems. My recollection is that they're typically used at less than 10psi, which is (if my conversion arithmetic is correct) would require the bucket to be about 276" above the emitting surfaces. Entirely impractical, so the result is the same.
Water delivery efficiency is an entirely different question. I'm sure you could come up with an even more efficient system with hypodermic needles positioned adjacent to the roots, and then declare your hollow watering stake inefficient. (Just saying all these efficiencies are relative)
Soaker hoses and drip lines are much more efficient (particularly for smaller crop plants spread over large areas) compared to water sprayer systems, especially if operated on a timer to operate in the early morning hours. They're widely used in arid zones where water supplies are limited. With fewer plants with small root systems your watering stake approach may be superior though a bigger PITA if the garden gets bigger.
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