Hello, I'm Ryan Neal. County agent in Benton County. We're here in Bentonville at a helping hands pantry garden. And I'm going to talk about setting up a drip irrigation system before the drip irrigation system was set up here.

Someone was required to hand water all of these garden beds, 40 plus three to four times a week, depending on what the weather was doing. So after we were able to set up this drip irrigation system, put it on a timer that eliminated that position, and the beds are able to get more uniformly watered when they want

to without the added labor. So the first thing that we need to do is to measure our flow. So if you're setting up a large drip irrigation system or just a small one in front of your home, the most important question that I need to answer is what is our flow?

Here we have a Frostproof hydrant. But if you've just got a wall mounted hydrant on the side of your house. What we're going to need to do is get a five gallon bucket. We're going to turn it on full blast.

And we're going to see how many gallons we can fill up in a minute or how long it takes us to fill up this five gallon bucket. So I've got my phone here and I've got the stopwatch set.

I'm going to turn it on full bore and I'm going to press start to the stopwatch and just see how long it takes to fill up this bucket. Three, two, one. So that took right at 20 seconds to fill up a five gallon bucket.

The next thing we're going to do is go to the calculator app and figure out how many gallons then we would get in an hour. So if that was 20 seconds to fill up five gallons, we know then that we could get 15 gallons in a minute.

Times 60 would be 900 gallons per hour. So now that we've identified our flow as being 900 gallons per hour, we can decide on how many row feet we can water in each zone. So in this case, we have more than adequate flow at nine hundred gallons to be able to water this entire garden in one zone

. It is unlikely that everybody will have such high pressure. And so it might be important if our flow is less, say, 20 gallons per hour. We would have to break up our garden beds and multiple zones in order to adequately water each garden section.

So what I've decided to use in this situation is quarter inch drip tape. This drip tape has emitters every 12 inches. And each of these emitters will drip out a gallon per hour. So in this case, with 900 gallons per hour, I can run 900 feet of this drip line before I have to break it in to

another zone. So it'd be unlikely that we would want to run 900 feet of this continuously. It's also important to note that because this is so thin at quarter inch, it will not get the volume of water through it.

And so it's limited to 30 feet per run. So of that nine hundred feet, we can't have any individual run more than 30 feet. That works out great in a situation like this, where we have raised garden beds that are only 12 foot long.

But just note, if you've got a landscape with a very long bed, you can't have anyone run more than 30 foot long. The next things to think about when setting up a drip irrigation system is what all is involved.

Before we get to our garden beds, all of these I have sourced locally at our hardware store and can be found both locally or online if you choose. Some things to keep in mind is what we'll need to have a proper setup.

First thing, we have a pressure regulator. These are automatically set at either twenty five PSI or 50 PSI. I have chose the twenty five PSI because we're using a drip system and not an overhead irrigation system. And so it's important to have a pressure regulator so that we don't get too much pressure and potentially close up our

emitters. The next thing I would recommend would be the use of a timer. It's very important to try to water consistently, especially in the case of tomatoes. So we don't get a lot of blossom in rodder cat, they seem.

And we can do this very easily with just a simple. Or say, thirty dollar timer. It also helps us to water more consistently, so our water maybe for 15 minutes, four times a day rather than one hour, once a day.

And that helps move the water horizontally in the garden beds. The next thing I have here is what's called a backflow preventer that prevents any kind of sediment that might get sucked back in the drip line whenever it gets turned off from going back into the municipal water supply.

Many municipalities would also require an RP's before it goes to the Frostproof hydrant. The next thing I'd like to see is a filter. This is a simple screen filter in here. And that just prevents any debris that might be coming in the water lines from getting into your drip lines and potentially clogging.

So this is a simple screen filter that can easily be cleaned out. Let's say once a month for any sediment that might build up or algae. Now that we've set everything up at the Frostproof hydrant, we're out in the garden where we are going to bring the water in to these raised beds.

A couple of things to keep in mind is how we're going to do that without creating tripping hazards or places where the water is going to consistently get nipped by weed eaters or moers, things like that. And so what we decided to do here is just bury just below the surface.

This half inch. What I'm going to call a header line or transport line. And so this has just been buried at the base of this garden bed. And then in that we use these little quarter inch couplers, you just poke it in to the half inch line.

And then out of that comes our quarter inch drip tape. We can see it here. We also installed an on off switch so we can easily turn that on or off. We turn it off. Say when this garden bed doesn't need to be watered for a little while while we're turning it over to, say, a full vegetable

bed. So what we've done here is also we drilled a simple hole just to make it easy for the drip line to go into the bed and not get kinked. What I do like about this quarter inch line, it's almost like a jump rope and that it can easily be moved in or out of the bed without

easily getting kinked. Like sometimes the half inch line can in this garden bed, we decided to go with drip tape. But you may in the future decide you wanted many sprinklers, say if we wanted to germinate seeds or something like that.

But in most cases, the drip system works very well. What we like about it is it keeps the foliage dry, or at least not unnecessarily wet. And this can help prevent a lot of our foliar diseases that, for instance, tomatoes tend to suffer from in our wet, humid climate.

It is possible with a drip irrigation system to put fertilizer through the irrigation water. There are many common solutions sold at hardware stores or garden centers that can be used. But please keep in mind, a lot of our organic fertilizers, like seaweed or fish emulsion can tend to clog up the emitters.

So it's important if we are going to inject some sort of fertilizer to do so before the filter at the Frostproof hydrant. That way we can filter out any impurities or large particles that might otherwise clog the emitters.

One last thing to consider is winterization. We want to design our system so that we can easily drain the water out of it when winter comes. The Frostproof hydrant does a very good job of winterizing itself. All you need to do is unscrew whatever you have that's hooked up to it.

But we also need to go to the lowest point of the system and think about being able to drain the water out of that. We do not have to take the in caps off of these because they will drip water out of the emitters and freezing is not an issue for them.

But just to keep in mind, especially if we don't have our head or line buried more than 18 inches deep, that we need to come up with a way to easily and effectively winterreise our system before winter. So in conclusion, when setting up a drip irrigation system, the first thing we need to know is our flow.

Next thing is to keep in mind are inserting a backflow preventer, pressure regulator and filter. Also, consider adding a timer just for ease of use when monitoring our soil moisture levels. Sometimes it's a good idea just to take a handful of soil to see if we're over or under watering.

If I'm easily able to squeeze this soil into a ball and squeeze out water than it's likely over water. If I can easily make a ball and it breaks apart whenever I. Hustle it up in the air, then likely it's underwater again, consider pulsing your irrigation system, meaning water it for a short amount of time, more frequently

rather than a long time. Less frequently. This will help the water to move more horizontally in a situation like a raised bed. Again, if you need help calculating these figures or just walking through the system, feel free to contact your local county extension agent.