Yes, snirt. That stuff that happens as spring comes, it's half snow and half dirt. The ground is frozen, anything that's not frozen is soupy mud, and we're still at least a couple weeks away from even the earliest plantings. As far as I'm concerned, the name of the season between winter and spring is Snirt. But, there's still lots of other work that can be done, and a good excuse to get out in the warm afternoon sun is never a bad thing.
And so what's on my mind today is hoses! Now is the perfect time to check hoses for leaks, bad fittings, etc. Because of the location of my garden and fruit trees, I have a lot of hose. About 275 feet, actually. This all needs to be unrolled, hooked up, and checked for leaks or cracks. Also, I need to test sprinklers and watering wands, etc. Now is the time to buy any new hoses or fittings, instead of waiting until the last minute and discovering that you're 20 feet of hose short. Also, I'll be picking up a few soaker hoses to use this year, instead of overhead watering. I expect that this will save some water, as well as reduce the risk of fungus or other similar disease on plants.
So to understand exactly how his will work, there needs to be a brief description of the garden layout. I have always planted in an open garden, no boxes or containers. This is the traditional way of growing things, and the most common. It's also very inefficient. I'll go into this more in another post, but for now, the important detail is that this year, our garden will consist almost entirely of four inch high raised beds 24 feet long and four feet wide.
To water those beds, and not the walkways between them, I'm switching them over to soaker hoses that I'll place in each bed immediately after planting, and then leave there all summer. Advantages to this method are that I won't be spraying water into the wind, so it all goes on the ground, and that I'll be able to measure, quite accurately, how much water goes on each bed. To do this, I hook up the entire system of hoses and soaker hose. Roll the soaker hose up and put it in a 5 gallon bucket. Turn the water on and time how long it takes to fill the bucket. I now can calculate the flow rate of the soaker hose in gallons per minute. This flow rate is dependent on quite a few things, such as what the water pressure is at the faucet, how long the hose is running to the soaker hose, and how many soaker hoses I'm running off the same supply. If I want to run two or more soaker hoses at the same time, I put each one in a bucket and time it.
Since my goal with watering is to water less often but water deeper, to encourage deep root growth, I'm going to start with a goal of watering one inch per week, assuming that it doesn't rain at all that week, as I have fairly heavy soil that retains water well. I almost certainly will have to adjust this during the heat of the summer, but I need a starting point. Since my garden beds are 96 sq feet, I'll round that up to 100 sq feet per bed. So, once a week, I need enough water to fill an area 100 sq feet and 1 inch deep. If that were 1 sq foot, 1 inch deep, that would be 1/12 of a cubic foot. For ease of conversion, there are 1728 cubic inches in one cubic foot, and there are 231 cubic inches in a gallon of water. So, divide 1728 by 231 and we get 7.48 gallons in 1 cubic foot of water. Now, we only want 1/12 of that, so divide by 12 to get .62 gallons per square foot of garden, gives us 1 inch of water. Multiply by 100 because my beds are 100 sq feet, and that means I need to put about 62 gallons of water on each bed each week, as a starting point, assuming no rain.
So, once I know how long it takes the soaker hose to fill a 5 gallon bucket, the rest is easy math. To estimate, one brand of soaker hose I've looked at flows approximately 54 gallons of water per hour per 100 feet of hose. Since I'll be using about 50 feet of soaker hose in my 24 foot long beds, that becomes 27 gallons per hour. I need 62 gallons to water a bed, so that means I need to leave the soaker hose on for about 2 hours and 15 minutes. Of course the reality of my setup will be different, and the only way to know is to buy the hoses and test them in a bucket, and calculate from there.
Why do all this? It certainly isn't necessary, I've grown vegetables for years using sprinklers and watering cans. Well, not all vegetables need the same amount of water. By knowing how much water comes out of the soaker hose per hour, I have a baseline that I can adjust from for each bed, based on what's growing in it, the weather, how much rain we've had, and what type of soil I have in each bed. Even going further than this, I can now document this in a journal, so I can track results from year to year, and experiment against that to try to get better production from the garden. Another reason is so that I can water at night, using a hose timer. Less water is lost to evaporation when watering is done at night. Knowing how long the water needs to run on a bed, I just set the timer, turn on the water, and head in for the night. No more checking on the sprinkler every 20 minutes to make sure the wind hasn't changed and isn't leaving an area dry, or that the sprinkler hasn't stuck. Sure I could set a timer on soaker hoses without knowing how much water comes out of them, but I'd rather not guess, when I can know exactly how much water I'm putting down with just a little bit more work in the spring.
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