Building a veg plot irrigation system.....

Ebay have loads of small 12V centrifugal pumps, timers, soil conductivity meters and small bore tubing. I bought quite a lot of the stuff. Easy to use over a season and the tubing can be reused or dumped if a change to the plot is needed.

Not good for 1/2 an acre, but for a small enclosed garden it's cheap.

AB

Make your own soaker hose. Get and old ordinary hose. Make holes in it with a hammer and nail.

on 29/04/2019, snipped-for-privacy@tesco.net supposed :

That is what I would do, but depending on the length/ number of holes, you might need to make the holes smaller to ensure there is still enough water pressure to reach the far holes.

I have found "Tropf-Blumat" works. Treznal, but available in the UK.

A clay cone on a water-filled widget opens and closes a thin silicone rubber tubing, in response to the actual moisture of the soil around the clay cone. Get the water to the plant bed any which way, and then run silicone tubing through the device, and lead open droppers off it with tees. one dropper needs to be near the device, so it shuts off when the soil is moist enough. The silicone tubing is strictly necessary only in the device, so it can shut off the water, but it's cheap enough (pound a meter, about) and lasts well.

I like because it works with the water pressure from a head of a few feet of water, and waters only when dry. No power supply needed. Needs adjusting, tuning, thought in setting up, though; also paying-for.

Thomas Prufer

I fiddledwith all those things years ago. The attrition rate on the drip feed items could be very high. Eventually I went with a rotating sprinkler on a home made tripod moving it about as necedssary.

unnecessarily large

too large

Long long ago. Expect jet blockages. Water in hoses freezes, you need a method to handle that. These days I'd be tempted to use a few weep holes & let it drain itself, after checking that it did.

NT

In message snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

There is lots of commercially available *oozy hose*. Some are flat when not under pressure so presumably frost proof.

One of these

There are timers on ebay too

There's also the kind made from rubber granulate, oozes along the entire circumference. Cheap, as I think it's old tires/tyres. Frostproof, weatherproof over several years at least, IME. Requires mains pressure though.

Thomas Prufer

It's just that I have a collection of push fit stop ends, equal tees, couplers, elbows and almost 25 m of barrier pipe in my garage.....

It seems practical to try and use this for the plot rather than buying new hozelock or gardena kit.....

And was wanting to keep costs down....

I currently use some of that for a rather dry part of my garden. It works well, though after a few years the pipe is beginning to fail in places. I can cut out the leak and rejoin, but unless I am lucky, inserting the plastic fitting splits the pipe again. I chased one such failure last week for quite some distance before I got it safely (I hope) rejoined.

Chris