Drip irrigation system

I'm starting to think that I will need to install a drip irrigation system. Last year my cucumbers and melons were a bit miserable from not enough watering, mainly because their place was hardly accessible. This year, I may have to leave for a month during the summer, and it will be easier for whoever needs to water the garden when I'm away.
I have a rainwater barrel buried in the garden, slightly below ground level. We have both floods and droughts here, but it was never empty or overflowing.
The areas that will need watering are in three different directions from the pump, and one of them is uphill. But the whole garden is rather small, so not more than 3-4 meters in each direction. Perhaps I should start with putting a separator on the pump, so it can have a different line for each direction, and maybe one more for the regular hose?
I have no experience with this kind of things, but it looks rather simple... and I'd love to learn it!

The plants that will need watering are tomatoes, zuccini, cucumbers, the "three sisters", and some new fruit trees and shrubs, which I will plant in spring. Each of these areas will need a different amount of water so I guess it's better if they had individual lines. I have no greenhouse but everything is covered with some kind of mulch. I will also use sheep wool as mulch. Should the pipes be buried under something, inside some channels, or just on top of everything?

Flora,

In the past I used a drip irrigation system I purchased through a company called Dripworks.  I really liked their products and if I ever decide to expand my irrigation system it will be from that company.

I am trying to envision your system, and I think that the simplest approach is to have a single timer valve connected to your water source.  You would then run a main feeder line out and branch off in whatever direction that you need.

You mentioned that one garden bed would run uphill.  Just how far uphill are we talking?  If you are using an outdoor water faucet, it likely has plenty of pressure to run a fairly long distance up hill.  My system runs at 80 psi.  You can go to the dripworks website and they can calculate the pressure loss/gain with change in altitude.

One of the nice things about dripworks is that many of their products are pressure compensating, meaning that even with fairly large changes in altitude, the water flow remains consistent.

There are other drip systems available, but I have not seen one as comprehensive as Dripworks.com.  To boot, their starter kits are fairly inexpensive.

Good Luck, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

Eric

Thank you, Eric!
I will probably choose something more local ;) but I will look through their resources.
One seller had a timer available but with that model, the pump would have to be turned on all the time... which would use a lot of power (we only have a solar water heater). I could probably arrange a photovoltaic panel just for the pump... but that would require more skills than I currently have. But it's still a nice project... so maybe? Cover of the barrel would be a great place for the panel... it's a very hot place, lizards love to use it for sunbathing. I usually go there to take photos of them!

A photo of a lizard sunbathing on the barrel cover, which could also hold a photovoltaic panel to produce electicity for the water pump:

Nice picture of the frog.  Good Luck with the drip system.  For years I relied on my drip system, which in my opinion is the best form of irrigation.  Recently I have discovered wood chips and mushrooms and I now no longer need irrigation at all.

At any rate, good Luck and please keep us updated on your progress.

Eric

Eric - can you expand on your use of wood chips and mushrooms?

Hi Christine,

Welcome to Permies.

here's a post from when this came up a few weeks ago.

Scroll down a bit and I've got description and pics of what I've been using for a while.

https://permies.com/t/121561/Drip-tape-problems

Christine,

Sorry I did not see this earlier, I have been extremely busy for the last week and unfortunately had little Permies time.

That being said, I will gladly expound about using mushrooms and wood chips.  For years, I was a traditional "dirt" gardener--I tilled my beds to start them and then dug them over every year thinking I was giving them a fresh start.  I discovered Permies, Gabe Brown, and especially local Permie RedHawk and learned I was wrong.  In a nutshell, Keeping the soil living (having an active, living root system and soil biology) will help rain water infiltrate much better than "dirt," and keeping a growing canopy over the soil will shade the soil from intense sunlight, prevent evaporation and make irrigation almost meaningless.

But my biggest discovery happened about 5 years ago when I had done a great big cleanup of an overgrown living fence row.  I had to severely trim it back and I took all the branches (mostly the prolific Autumn Olive around here) and fed them to a wood chipper and that yielded me a row of wood chips that was about 8' long by 5' wide at the base by almost 5' tall at the very top.  This was a huge amount of chips and while I wanted to utilize more chips, I had no idea what to do with so many wood chips.  My initial thought was to use some old, left-over 10-10-10 from my pre-Permies days in order to speed bacterial decomposition.  I was instead encouraged to use mushrooms, specifically Wine Cap mushrooms to do the job faster and better.

i took those chips and transferred them to a longer bed (32' long) and spread them to a depth of about 6"-1'" depending on the exact spot.  I then inoculated with Wine Cap spawn, planted tomatoes (to provide some shade), covered with straw and sat back and waited.  It took almost a year, during which time I thought the experiment was a failure, but just over a year later I had heaps of mushrooms push out and the compost they left behind was wonderfully soft, rich, and full of all kinds of soil organisms (it seethed with earthworms!).  I now cover with a thin layer of chips each year to act as a buffer against evaporation.

I am including a link to a long-running post about my use of mushrooms, including my successes and my plentiful failures.  I try to keep it updated so as to keep a running record of my mushroom experiment so that anyone can learn and contribute to the conversation.

https://permies.com/t/82798/composting/composting-wood-chips-chicken-litter

I am also including a link to my mushroom-growing central link thread.

https://permies.com/t/wine-cap-mushrooms



Good Luck and I hope this helps.  If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Eric