Apologies to a former high school student of mine for the title of this post, since it’s a takeoff on his satirical column entitled: “My New Filing System is Unstoppable“. Warning: his cartoons are replete with F-bombs and not for the sensitive or politically correct. Some of his other work routinely appears in Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, etc.
But I mainly just wanted to upload a couple of photos to illustrate a reasonably low-tech, time-saving and very water-conserving system that we’ve arrived at to water our roughly 100 tomatoes, peppers, etc. Our garden is laid out in raised beds, each approximately thirty feet long and populated by a single row of peppers, tomatoes or whatever. Each plant is planted next to a watering spike with attached two-liter bottle (bottom cut off). Fill the bottle and you deliver a half gallon to the root zone, with next to no evaporative loss. It works like a dream. The problem is the labor involved, moving from bottle to bottle and frankly, just finding the dang thing when it is buried beneath the foliage typical of some of the old heirloom tomatoes. Not at all a back-friendly job.
So here’s a shot of an individual pepper plant, showing the bottle.
And here is a coiled (50 ft) hose that I use to water the bottles on both sides of an aisle. One former problem was that the hose tended to tangle on itself as you carried it from aisle to aisle. But now, the inserted hoe acts as a hose rack, easily carried from the top of the handle and allowing the hose to stretch down the row, but quite easily replaced on the shaft without tangling so that you can then quickly move to the next pair of rows. The hose end has a wand with a fingertip on/off, so no stooping and no wasted water.
Unrelated, but here are some bees at sunset, prior to re-entering at day’s end.
And here is a shot of the side of the chicken coop, showing why our entertainment budget is so high. All RFD channel, all the time.
Posted on July 27th, 2009 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Gardening
I LOVE the watering system. And the GYWO reference. But especially the watering system. So glad I saw this before we shelled out $$ to buy a drip system! The sheet mulch looks good too. . .
Yeah, I own a copy of “Get Your War On” as well. He’s quite the satirist and a nice guy to boot.
The watering system is clearly more labor-intensive than drip. But we had issues with inconsistent delivery and opted for this instead (at least for now). The other problem with drip for us is that since we rotate garden and chickens, the layout of the tubing would change (tomato vs beans, for example).
Later I’ll do a post on the mulch system, also a product of years of trial and error.
I tried drip system for one hear, then it clogged due to the dirt and such. Hard to use from year to year. I now use sprinklers, just turn the knob once. Have to reinstall them though because we redid all the beds into boxes this year.
I will keep the bottle method in mind for other yard locations though
)
I am totaly intrigued with your bottle irrigation system; I think that this may work for my flower bed. The hoe in the hose thing is brilliant. I have a coiled hose and it’s always getting tangled as I drag it around. Thank you for a solution!