Garden Watering System

Northern Illinois was hit with a great drought this year. Consequently, we found it necessary to irrigate our garden to prevent total loss. We created a simple soaker hose arrangement that was easily put together in an afternoon. The soaker hose was placed under the straw and newspaper that we used for mulch. Even durning the extreme dry periods, only about 30 minutes every third day was needed to keep our garden bright green. As mentioned, our design was very simple. Our planning actually started prior to the installation of the watering system. We began by laying out our garden in a manner that allow for a simple water system design. We planted all of our row crops, (beans, potatoes, tomatoes, etc.) lengthways from one end of the garden to about 3/4 to the other end, (about 50 feet). In the 1/4 that remained at the far end, we planted hill crops (pumpkin, cucumber, squash, etc.). This allowed us to design a system that fed from one end through 50 foot soaker hoses, and terminated into tree rings at the other end. The tree rings were placed around the hills, while the long stretched of row crops were supported by the 50 foot soaker hoses. We required 10 rows, so our equipment list looked something like this: