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Santa Rosa, CA.

This year I would like to avoid overhead watering if possible. I was thinking of running soaker hoses next to or between the side vines. In last year's vegetable garden we hooked up 200 feet of hose with even coverage. How many feet of hose is needed for an AG?
Each plant would be on it's own zone and hoked up to a timer. Has anyone had luck with a method similar to this? What problems will I have? My hope is to automate most of my watering and spend more time on other needs of the plant.

1/1/2008 12:37:59 PM

Owensboro, Ky.

PM, there is a company called dripworks, that sells this type of system in many varities...they also offer a system design service!!! Hope this helps. Peace, Wayne

1/1/2008 12:42:20 PM

Ctpumpkin@optonline.net

Soakers cannot be hooked together in series. If they're run in series, the second or third hose in a run won't work. If you use a manifold & run them in parallel you won't have a terrible drop in performance.

I've done "OK" using a series of manifolds by running up to 4 soakers at a time. To get coverage right you should expect to run as many as eight 50' soaker hoses for small plant & more like 12 for a large one.

Figure around 50 square feet of coverage area per 50' soaker. Some folks will try to reduce the "rule of one" but results will suffer in many soils.

1/1/2008 2:59:37 PM

Fresno, Ca

Patch Master,
I have had good success in the past with a product called vineline. It is a drip tube with emiters built into the tube. You can get it with different spacing between emiters. Also t-tape is similar to soaker hose and commercial growers bury it about 12 inches and let the water sub up to the plants. I automated my patch with the vineline a couple years back and was fairly successful. the output of t-tape is a little slower so you would have to watch it close to make sure you don't underwater.

2/22/2008 12:29:39 PM