Northern Gardening; Joe Routh

Welcome to Northern gardening here on the North Shore radio WTOP in support of Northern gardening comes from Evergreen originals greenhouse located at 16 sky port lane in Grand Prairie evergreen original's greenhouse specializes in annual Zimm perennials for our northern climate. Also offering veggies herbs and a wide selection of hanging baskets tubs and planters information available in person or at 3 8 7 2 8 6 2 and supported northern gardening also comes from Edwin ethos and incorporated contractors working to fill landscaping needs in the northland celebrating 60 years of serving Cook County 3 8 7 1 6 4 4. Well I'm your host policy. Glad to be with you. And we will be talking this hour about water systems Joe Roth is in the studio with us thanks so much for joining us Rick. Dr. Murray welcome. And Joe and his wife Mary are owners of North Light farm and you're hopeful and they lived up here for 20 years and gardening ever since they arrived. And in

1995 Joe was explaining this to me a little bit ago 1095 he received a grant from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to design install and demonstrate rough catchment systems that's what's really interesting first that you could go just as a couple to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and then get a grant How did how did you do that process what what was in that entailed. Well. First of all there was a need that had to be identified. From our point of view and the need is that when we purchased our home we had an existing well that the previous owners had installed that was 400 feet deep three hundred eighty five feet of that was in granite and in order to get enough water into the well for us they had to dynamite the bottom of the well to fracture the bedrock in order to get the water to come in. And so it's a low to moderate capacity Well one of our first attempts of using water out of that well for watering the garden was using one of the

soaker hoses and it ran the well dry and it takes you know one to two days to recharge it. So we learned that we had to find other sources of water other than using our well water. The previous owners had installed a gasoline powered pump down by one of the wildlife ponds that had been installed on the property and that pump would pump water up through a large one and a half inch poly line about halfway to the house and then regular garden hoses were used the rest of the way to bring water up to the garden. But that wasn't very effective and it tended to be noisy and so we were trying to find another option. Mary came up with the idea in 1905 to apply to the Minnesota Department of egg through their energy at sustainable AG program to get a grant to design install and demonstrate a rough catchment system for water and then to be able

to collect the water and then use a drip irrigation system to water our organic garden beds. So. What we had to do first of all was figure out well how much how much water could we collect off the roof of the House and our rough section we have four different rough sections on our house and we figured that three of them could be used to collect water that could be used for the garden and then the fourth smaller rough section could be used to collect water just in a big rain barrel. So what we did is we started looking around and trying to figure out how much water can you collect off of the roof of the house. And it turns out that in a one inch rainfall for every square foot of catchment area you have on the roof you can collect point 6 to 3 gallons of water. Now when people look at a rough they think well does it make any difference if it has a steep pitched rough or a flat pitched rough.

And what you need to look at is the square foot of the rough as a horizontal surface it doesn't matter what the pitch is on it because water is falling straight down. And so the easiest way to do it is for instance if you have a slab you can measure the slab that the house sits on and then add say the overhang for the rough. So just to give you an idea if you had a house that was on a slab that was like thirty eight feet by a 23 feet. And you had a one foot rough overhang on all four sides. Then you'd have approximately a catchment area of 25 feet by 40 feet or 1000 square feet. So that 1000 square foot of rough catchment area in a one inch rain is going to collect six hundred twenty three gallons of water. That's a lot of water. It is a lot of water that's more than a several five gallon buckets. So

right. Yeah. So when you think about that I mean you you can understand why people have problems with water infiltration and abasement and things if they don't have grading around the house to carry the water away from it or they don't have gutter and downspouts to direct it where they want to. So what we ended up doing was. We designed a system that used to govern downspouts are installed on each of the rough sections of the house to duct water into a underground collection system so we we had the regular gutters and they went through collector downspouts the downspouts went down the house and then about three feet above the ground the downspouts went into a four inch PVC pipe and that four inch PVC pipe then duct necked down to a three inch PVC schedule 40 that went underground and it drains the

water by gravity to a little lower spot in the yard and we installed a fifteen hundred gallon concrete cistern there which is also known as a subject tank. And this seemed to be the the least expensive option and we knew that we could buy it locally have it delivered and have it set in place. So we dug a hole for the septic tank. We had the. Fifteen hundred gallon cistern brought in and dropped in place and then we put two inches of insulation of styrofoam insulation on the sides and on the top of it. And then we put about three feet of soil over the tank now to insulate the tank because we need to hold when the water is collected in the tank we hold water in there all year round. And the reason is during the summer we obviously need it for watering the garden in the winter. It's important to have water in the tank so that

you don't have frost pushing against the sides of the tank without something inside of it pushing back it would collapse. Yeah or it could crack. Yeah. So to further. Kind of insulate the tank we installed a 12 by 24 foot hoop greenhouse over the top of the tank. Clever So although all the power and all the plumbing and everything that's going coming to the tank coming out of the tank is all covered by the greenhouse and the greenhouse is very effective at preventing the water from freezing. Even in a very cold winter. Yeah. And so now it's in the tank. Right so now it's rained the water has drained into the gutters down the downspouts end of the collection system underground and gravity flows into the fifteen hundred gallon cistern. And the question is how do you get it out of the cistern that yeah.

And what we decided to do was to install a pump submersible pump in the cistern to be able to pump water up and out to garden spigots. We've got to spec it's in the greenhouse so we have to spec ops that are located right in the middle of the garden area and. What we decided to do instead of using a kind of a conventional sump pump type of system. We found that if we took a half horsepower submersible well pump and installed it in there. This would work fine. However to install the submersible pump from a well we had to do it in an unconventional manner because in the well the pump is sitting vertically in the bottom you know below the water level and in the water is coming in through the

pump as being pumped up into the you know into the system then it goes to the house. In our system we had to install this horizontally so that we could have access to more water because the pump stage is on top of the motor stages on the bottom. So if you put this vertically you'd lose maybe a foot of water that would be available. And you obviously can't pump water if you don't. I mean once it gets below your pump stage you're out of water. Yeah so. After doing some research I found out that in order to install this so that it would work properly and keep the pump cool we actually installed the this pump not only horizontally but we installed it in a four inch PVC pipe that was blocked at the one end and then when I turned the pump on water enters the bottom flows past the

motor goes to the pump stage and from there it goes into the system. The idea is that you want the pump to have water flowing past it so it keeps it cool. So that's why we designed this so that it has to drop in through this 4 inch PVC pipe it forces that then passed the motor so the motor housing keeps keeps cool cool. And is there a way for you to access this pump if you have any problems with it. Yes the one we installed the cistern or septic tank we put all tanks have covers on them so you can access them for pumping. Yeah we installed 3 12 inch risers off the tank so when the risers come up to above just above the surface of the greenhouse and then we have a cover on top of that so that critters and certain things don't fall into it. But by taking that cover off not only can we access the pump

but we can see water coming in and kind of get an idea how much water is in the tank. And that leads me to the question of how you gave an example and I want to say this again because I think it's so fascinating so if you have a roof that's a floor slab area that's thirty eight by 23 and you have a one foot over overhang and your catchment area is 25 feet by 40 feet which translates into a thousand square feet which equals six hundred twenty three gallons per one inch of rainfall. All right. How big was your rough. Do you have what the. Yeah yeah. There is your graph I should say not past tense tense so we still we still have to have a room. Let's see here. The roof that we actually our roof has because you've got several different areas you're doing some things with the rain barrel but I guess what I'm thinking of is here you've got if you have six hundred twenty three gallons

going into this fifteen hundred gallon cistern How long's it take to fill up and what happens when it gets full. OK I'm sorry I was a roundabout way of getting to that. Well the the the three roof sections on the house that we're using to collect water that goes into the cistern are twelve hundred twenty five square feet. So one inch of rain would produce approximately seven hundred sixty three gallons of water. Now there's always a little there's always some evaporation there's always some other possible loss but up that's pretty close to being what you'd collect. We also have one rough section of the house that's three hundred and eighty nine square feet that we have connected to a 75 gallon rain barrel. Now the rain barrel is a it's. We did this for a low tech demonstration of how to collect water and we bought the rain barrel originally from Gardner supply and it was designed to collect rain from from the downspouts So

the rain barrel has a grate on top so children can't get into it. Then it has a screen on top of that to keep insects out of it. And it has an overflow tube so once it fills up it overflows and you can direct that away from the house. And then at the bottom of it it has a speck up that you can hook a garden hose to and then simply use gravity to drain water out. And so we've used that to water flower beds and other things. But for irrigating are the actual garden through drip irrigation. We need to have a pressurized system. Yeah and that's really what's happening with your cistern where that's going and again that kind of leads me back what happens when that fifteen hundred gallon cistern fills up can you turn off your catchment process what we actually have. The cistern that we bought has an inlet and it has an outlet. Now the outlet is about three inches lower

than the inlet. So when the water level gets up to that point. Water drains out through what's called a drain to daylight line and continuous sloping downhill and it empties out in one of our fields above a second pylon that we have. So no matter how much water we get once the cistern is full the excess water just flows over flows. Wow what an interesting process if you just tuned in we're speaking with Joe Ruth. He's an owner of he and his wife Mary are owners of North Light farm near halls London we're talking about a catchment system that was developed in as a result of a 1995 grant from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. And this is a really interesting process how long did it take you to do that I mean you've got the great 1095 how long until you actually set up and ready to go with it. Well it took us two years actually the first

year we did the installation of the underground piping and the cistern itself and put the greenhouse up the second year we put the gutter downspouts on. We built a raised garden beds and we basically got the whole system put together and finished off as part of the grant process we had to do demonstrations of the system to summer so in 1906 and 1907 we basically had open houses where we invited people down and we had like 65 or 70 people show up and then we would talk about how we design and install the system how it worked and also obviously about gardening that's pertinent. So now we're talking about the pressure assistance So let's talk a little bit about how you're getting it out of the cistern into the garden with your drip system.

Well the. When we were doing all the trenching work and in order to do the trenching we since we have clay soil there with rock in it and places we brought in a ditch witch that we rented and a ditch which is designed to dig a trench. Usually about six inches wide and depending on the size of the dish which you can go down. Is as deep as three or sometimes four feet and so what we did is we we ran of the ditch witch and we did all of our trenching in one summer so that we trench lines from the house to where the cistern was going to be. We also trenched in a line that went down to our large pond which I'll talk about in a minute and we trenched in. A line to go out to a future when generator site. So I thought as long as we got this here we're just going to do it we're going to go ahead

and dig the trenches we're going to put all the piping in we're going to put all the power cables in that we need to and then we're going to fill up the trenches that everything's going to. All the infrastructure will be in his underground. Did you have to insulate those pipes. No because they don't hold water in the winter. OK. Just just as an aside our collection system once we get to about November we take the collectors off the four inch PVC pipes that actually the downspouts fit into. We take those collectors off which are simply friction fed on the three inch PVC and we kept a three inch PVC. And then we put a four inch. Basically drainpipe the end of the downspout and we direct that away from the house. Yeah we don't want we don't want ice snow and other cold water going into the cistern in the

winter because we're trying to keep the cistern warm enough so that it doesn't freeze. Yeah and so the first winter the winter of 95 '96 we had to find out well how cold is that water going to get in there and we bought ourselves a stock tank heater thinking you know we may have to keep it warm enough so I bought a inexpensive indoor outdoor thermometer and I installed it inside the greenhouse which is again over the cistern and I took the outside lead for that and I simply dropped it down and put it in the water in the tank so I could constantly monitor what the temperature of the tank was and it also registered maximum minimum temperatures. Well all winter long I mean it was a very cold winter we had. I have a picture of that green house with four feet of snow around it and so all winter long I dig my way out there and dig dig open the

door and go in and I check the temperature. And by March it hit the lowest temperature but it only hit 40 degrees before it started warming up again. Wow. So I realized that you know the water was not going to freeze in the tank we didn't need the stock tank heater and the system as it was designed was working properly. Excellent well too if you're insulating the ground unless the ground is actually freezing the ground is maintaining a certain ambient temperature as well right especially with snow on it. Yeah so you know that was a winter we had a lot of snow. Now it would be interesting to know how is it done when there's been less snow. Well. As far as I know there's no cracks in it. You hold water. The good news is the good news Absolutely. Well that is absolutely interesting. So describe a little bit now you've put all these trenches in and you've got your different lines going on. And you said they're connected to four different faucets.

Well right. There's basically there's a pair of hose bibs in the greenhouse and a pair of hose bibs on a post right in the middle of the garden. Yeah. So the plumbing comes up out of the tank through through this what they call an access port which is about two and a half to three feet in diameter and the plumbing comes out and so I just. Plumbed right off of that for the hose bibs in the greenhouse. And then I ran a 1 inch poly pipe down from there to it from above grade in the greenhouse underground back through the same trench that the water comes in to that and the power lines come into from the house. And I ran that back up and simply put a post in the middle of the garden and installed to hose bibs on it so I can when I can turn the pump on in the greenhouse with a switch and that pressure rises the whole system and then I simply decide where I want to take the water off of. I

also installed in the greenhouse a pressure gauge so I know exactly how much pressure I have in the system and the way I regulate the pressure is one of the hose bibs in the greenhouse has a short hose that goes back into back through this access port in the top of the cistern. So what I do is I turn on the pump and I open up the line. That is basically a diversion diverse water back into the cistern and by opening and closing that somewhat I can regulate my pressure very precisely I can literally get it down to one or two pounds. So I if I want £40 or £50 of pressure in my system I simply regulate it by opening that diversion line. The one thing that Virgin line does is lets say that you your hand watering something out and you've got a hose out in the garden and you shut the hose off and you forget that the pump is on.

Remember the pump always needs to have water flowing past the pump stage in order to keep it from overheating so the diversion line is always fit. It's always allowing water to flow through the pump and back into the cistern is just a continual loop so it not only allows me to adjust the pressure in the system but it also keeps the pump cool by allowing water to be flowing past it. Yeah and what kind of hose are you using as your. You got this going on to a system off of is that my misunderstanding here. Well the garden. The two initial sections of the garden which are about thirty five hundred square feet of total garden area have drip irrigation lines. Those drip irrigation lines are hooked by a hose to the hose bit in the middle of the garden and so I can I can zone it and

week we can talk about that in some detail when we get into the drip irrigation part of it. Basically I can hook it up if I want to I can just took a hose up and put an overhead sprinkler on oscillating sprinkler but drip irrigation works better for us. Yeah the less evaporation there is one one aspect of this system that I want to talk about in little more detail. I mentioned that when we put the trenches in we trench down to our farm pod which is probably a third of an acre surface area the farm pond. And it was installed by the original owners as a as a wildlife pond. And so it collects water just from natural runoff and it's clay soil so it always has water and it's never run dry. We have. We took the original gasoline powered pump that was down there out and we put in an electric pump and we install that in a pump a small pump housing.

So in the case that we don't have enough rain if we're in a drought condition we've had several years of very dry summers up here. I can take and flip a switch up in the house turn on this one and a half horsepower pump that's down by the pond. It'll draw pond water and pump it up to the house through a 1 and a half inch black poly pipe and it empties into the cistern. Oh yeah. So in about. 20 minutes I can probably put in 700 gallons of water and the pond is large enough that it doesn't affect the pond at all. It has no impact on the pollen level but it gives us a secondary source of water besides our rough catchment. Now the other thing I did with that system is when I was installing designing installing it I I designed the system so I could also use it for fire suppression.

So by changing a couple of valves and putting a fire hose on I can use the pump down to the pond to pump water through one and a half inch fire hose and it'll throw water 30 or 40 feet. So that's that was kind of a secondary benefit of having this other source of water and that we needed for our irrigation system. How often have you had to use it. Fortunately we haven't had any fires. Yeah that's good. How about for the tank. Well there's been some summers when we've only pumped up one Water Watch. There's been some summers we've pumped it up. Maybe six or eight times. So nice that it was there. Oh it's been a lifesaver as far as the garden. Yeah yeah. That's pretty interesting. Well we're speaking with Jo Ruth he and his wife Mary are owners of North Lake farm near Holborn we're talking about water water systems in particular talking about Roof catchments systems.

And it will take a little musical break will come back and talk about little some of the lower tech process some of the drip irrigation processes some things that maybe you don't have the process of are there the luxury of being able to put a cistern in your own yard. Well talk about some options for that. So you're listening to Northern gardening here on WTOP and we'll be right back. W. P.. We'll be right back.

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Get. You. When the music from the branches fire squad thought that be appropriate since we're talking about using the water system as preventative it's to support a northern gardening comes from superior lumber and sports. Full size lumber and hardware store

located one mile east of Moray superior lumber in sports is locally owned and offers a wide range of garden supplies patio furniture outdoor cooking grills more information available at 3 8 7 1 7 7 1 and supported northern gardening also comes from box hardware offering a full selection of gardening supplies organic options and whether hardy annuals and perennials and we're speaking with Jo Ruth today on Northern gardening and your host Paula Sunda. I'm glad to be with you we're talking about water systems and we've been talking about some pretty well really some high tech systems as far as doing some rough catchment but Joe what about more things more for the average gardener. What kinds of systems can we advocate. Well obviously anybody that has a roof can install a gutter and downspouts and collect water off the roof. Now in our house we opted ultimately to put metal roofing on the house because we wanted to have

a cleaner source of water not to have any petroleum products or any granular material from shingles and stuff in it. But anybody can collect water off of rough. But you need to collect it buy you stall the gutters and then the downspouts the downspouts can then be directed into barrels or buckets or whatever you want to use. But obviously from some of the figures we've we've been showing here like with a thousand square foot of catchment area you would collect six hundred twenty three gallons a couple of five gallon buckets are going to get filled up pretty fast right away. Yeah well you've been putting I've you know layered five gallon buckets along the drip edge without gutters and they fill up really fast. That's that's kind of amazing to think about that another container to besides the five gallon or they have gallon drum or sometimes stock tanks being used. But again having to have some kind of a cover at the top of them.

Right. Let me mention a couple of different options here. You can you can. I mean towards the real low tech in the things you can buy plastic garbage containers like 33 gallon garbage containers and you could use those. You can go to one of the lumber companies and buy these blue plastic blue barrels for those food grade. I'm pretty sure they are I think they've they've had food products in them. OK. That's that would be a concern. Absolutely you don't want something that's had a petroleum product or a chemical on it. Yeah but I don't think I don't think they're selling. I think these are food grade containers generally. Now obviously if you have a container one container so you've got a 55 gallon barrel. What happens when that face that's full of Missy they're going to overflow or you're going to lose water. One option is to link a series of containers together so you could take say four barrels or four garbage pails and you can go down to one

of the hardware stores you can buy some some parts and if you look on the Internet there's actually parts designed to link together barrels plastic barrels where you can drill a hole in the side and you can install a fitting this got a gasket on the inside the outside so it doesn't leak and it goes and it connects to another barrel. If you daisy chain together a series of barrels when the first one fills it overflows into the second that overflows into the third then etc. etc. and then to get the water out of the barrels you can simply have. Hole towards the bottom that you've put a spigot on that you can attach a garden hose. And again used gravity to drain water out and water your garden. So in that case it's helpful that your barrels are or your containers are uphill from the garden so that when you collect the water then it will gravity flow downhill to the garden.

Another source or another way of collecting water off throughout his do is to buy an above ground container. Now there's a number of companies out there. Again if you look on the Internet you'd probably be able to find them that specifically make plastic containers for collecting water. Some friends of ours down in Finland Minnesota have a barn and they've collected water off of there into a thousand gallon plastic container and then they use that for watering their livestock. But these containers come in sizes ranging up. I mean clear up to 12000 gallons. But if you want you could probably get something that's 500 gallons or a thousand gallons. And again it's above ground. So you can collect water in either gravity flow it out of there or you could have an external pump on the outside of it where it'll draw water out of the tank and then

pump it pump it to your garden. So there's different options if you're going to if you're going to go with an above ground larger plastic tank it might be a good idea to get one that's black. It costs slightly more than than a clear or opaque one. But the idea is it prevents algae growth on the inside of the tank in the water and it also lasts a little longer because of the UVA light is not as affected on the plastic as it would on a lighter colored container. This makes me think of reading Old Yeller and the young boy who kept getting out and swimming around in the cistern. Start talking about those bigger tanks that felt sarin a possibility. I mean could you use some sort of large swimming pool kind of thing if you happen to have one. Well I mean sure you could but the tanks the tanks that are above ground tanks are designed they're completely sealed containers they have a port on them

that you can access and they've got different ways that you can get the water out of them. But the idea is that you don't want you don't want to create a hazard. Right. And so you don't want animals or children you know to get to them. Good point to know when you're talking about having this above ground what about what it sits on itself are you setting this on the ground or do you need to have some kind of support underneath it. Well it depends on the size of the tank obviously if you had a very large tank. I mean you figure water is weighing in approximately eight pounds per gallon. So if you've got a thousand gallon tank you're going to have a thousand pounds of water plus the weight of the tank. So in that case you might want to have that either on a packed gravel base or on a slab cement slab or rain barrel or 75 yard sits on our front porch and that works fine.

You know so but just making sure that your porch is strong enough to sustain something like that that dead weight just sitting there. How about now you mention two what if about having your Hopefully your house is a little higher than where your garden is what if it isn't. Well then you're probably going to have to. I mean you can use the old water in the pond system. You can bucket it up there and sprinkle it. Or you could have you could have a small submersible pump like a sump pump and you could put that in the barrel and then you could connect that to your garden hose and have your power Lang go in there and use that to pump water out under pressure and then you could water through whatever system you wanted to. So there's various options you can use for water collection both high tech and low tech but. It's kind of whatever fits peoples budget. The best the size of their

garden their rough situation where it's located. One of the questions I have gotten asked by people is well. If I have a tank and the tank is above the garden can I get enough pressure in that tank to run a drip irrigation system. QUESTION Yeah so let's look at drip irrigation systems. Yeah. The drip irrigation system we have in our garden requires 10 pounds per square inch so it's a fairly low pressure system now. So if you ask well how how far would the water have to be above the garden to produce 10 pounds per square inch of pressure. The rule of thumb is for every two point three one feet above your discharge point you gain one pound per square inch water pressure. So in this case in order to

gain 10 pounds that water's going to have to be 23 feet above your garden Yanks. So if you have a hill there and you've got a house on the hill and you can collect water that's perfect that's fine but 23 feet it's a long ways. It is. So basically the height of a two story house exactly. How about that catchment up on the roof. Well I mean there's the two water towers that's what they're for. Yeah well exactly and that's why cities so the water towers are typically a hundred thirty feet high because they need to maintain a 50 to 60 pound per square inch of pressure of solar system. Interesting. So the other thing too I want to talk about is the appearance just as an aside as you know because they're thinking about those blue plastic containers or even a black plastic container doesn't seem very attractive but I have been looking through some of my different garden magazines seen some beautiful innovative ways of screening those whether you're just using some lattice and painting it or you know putting some of your garden growth around it

but there are options that you don't have to have these huge industrial looking containers surrounding your house. It's a very good point. Yeah. Did you do anything special with the rain barrel that you have. No because we wanted to be visible. I mean the idea is to demonstrate how we can collect water through a low tech system. So it's right by the front door so anybody coming to the house would see the barrel. Yeah fun like that. That's good. What about you know as we're talking about the drip irrigation systems. It seems to me there's been a fair amount of confusion about what that actually is in their soaker hoses their strip irrigation systems there's even to the point of well I don't know whether you regard a hose with a sprinkler on it set on low as being drip but how do you define that. Well I mean drip irrigation is a system that essentially applies water at ground level

to the plants and soaker hoses are the least effective way to do that because the soaker hoses have have several issues with them one is depending on the water you put into it if you're putting on rough catchment water or if you're putting in pond water or lake water there's going to be a problem with potentially plugging those up unless you put it through a filter. If you are put in well water in it would work better. But again they're not going to uniformly distribute the water throughout the length of the hose. One end is going to tend to be wetter than the other and as his pressure is higher on that one end right. Yeah so drip irrigation systems the systems that I use. Well actually I installed for our garden and I also installed a drip irrigation system at the community center for all of their plantings

around the community center. The company that I chose was a neta film so it's an easy t a f m and if you go to another film daish USA dot com. Is a website you can look at a lot of their products. The reason I chose not a femme is that it was a company that was developed in Israel because they were trying to essentially farm in the deserts and they needed to come up with a way of conserving water and then applying water uniformly and precisely to where they needed to so that they were a waste in any obviously center pivot irrigation systems that we see out west tend to be wasteful in many ways because if in a hot environment where they're spraying water into the air you have certain amount of evaporation and you probably don't have a precise delivery to where the plants are. So drip irrigation systems work best for role crops. They can be used in

orchards they can be used. Obviously they can be used even in lawns and things like this and for shrubbery around the house and that type of thing. The applications I'm most familiar with are directing water to the plants. So. If you look at a site like neta femme and you can google drip irrigation you can come up with all kinds of hits on it. But one of the things you're going to find when you start looking at lines are there's there's different specifications for different lines. And what we're what we need to talk about is how drip irrigation works first of all and we're talking about. Drip drip irrigation with intro goal drippers that are actually the the dripper system is inside the pipe. So if you have a half inch say black poly pipe the way they manufacture it is inside of the this pipe. They have the drip or system welded in place. And

these are spaced uniformly throughout the length of the pipe and then there's a hole where the water can get to the outside and the systems that we use because we're doing gardening and fairly intensive gardening we want the what are called emitters spaced 12 inches apart. And so if you have say we've got well let's say we have a garden bed that's four feet wide and 10 feet long. So he got 40 feet 40 square feet of garden surface there and we would put three lines in there that are uniformly spaced apart and the water would come in one end through what's called a header. So good let's go back to the cistern. Water comes pumps out of the cistern by the pump or it could come out of your well acid or whatever. Yeah. Oh and that water then would would go up to the hose Babbitt would

go into your system. Now if you have depends on what kind of a drip reliance you've got but it's probably a good idea to put a filter on there. In our case we we want to filter the water because we're using pond water and catchment water so we want to get out any particulate matter or biological matter. Now when you talk about a filter this is more than just a late screen. Well it is what we use is what's called a disk filter and the disk filter is it's not very large but it's got a series of plastic disks in it that have ridges on it and when the water pressure when the water is on it pressurizes these disk and pushes them together. And so essentially they filter out particulates. And in our case we're using 140 mesh. Particulate filter. So the disk filter will filter out biologicals if you're using well water or yours and city water that's it's

not an issue because you're going to have pure water. And in our case our system is our garden is set up to operate only on 10 pounds per square inch in our pump that we're pumping with is probably putting out 40 to 50 pounds per square inch. So we have a pressure reducer that reduces it down to 10 PSII and then it goes out into our our distribution lines now the distribution lines are simply hoses of different sizes like we use a three quarter inch flat hose that will carry the water up to the headers that lift it up. And for instance if you're using. Oh if you're using any kind of a raised bed you want to get the water from the ground level up to the bed surface so you have a little vertical piece of hose that carries it up there and then you have a header that the three dripper lines are connected to that the header simply distributes the water to the drip or lines the

dripper lines do the work. They are the ones that will allow the water to come in and then they precisely distribute the water throughout the emitters which are placed like in this case 12 inches apart and the emitters are all rated for instance ours are rated at four tenths of a gallon per hour per the metter. So every measure that we have is putting out four tenths of a gallon per hour. So how did you determine that. That's all. I mean how how do you determine what you need. Maybe that would be better. Well that gets to another issue about how do you determine how much do you need. Yeah and and I bet it depends. Well yeah let's say I get out my cheat sheet here and look at Yeah. Let's say that you were doing intensive gardening and that you want to apply the equivalent of one inch per rain per week to your garden

which is the standard recommended Meister right. Yeah. So obviously if you're getting one ensure a week of rainfall you don't have to worry about it. Yeah. If you're not then you want to supplement that say with a drip irrigation system. So in this case. Let's we'll just I'll just go through a calculation with you to give you an idea of what's involved here. Let's say we go back to this raised garden bed that's four feet wide and 10 feet long and. Get the three little lines going down it with the 12 inch 12 inches between each hall. I'm going to back up here back up. OK got it. I got a look at my notes. It's four feet wide 25 feet long. OK so we have 100 square feet. It's a little easier to work with the calculations when you have a nice round number like this. OK. So we have 100 square feet of raised bed when we're swimming no pads in there that we're trying to get water

uniformly to the surface of that bed. We've got three dripper lines each dripper line is 25 feet long because that's the length of the raised beds but yeah the emitters are placed one foot apart so we have a total of 25 emitters per line and there's three lines so we have 75 a metters. So you can figure out all right. Yeah. So and then in this case I used in the calculation six tenths of a gallon per hour per day measure the system that I put in at the community center is actually using six tenths of a gallon instead of a four tenths of a gallon so for the purposes of this discussion yeah we'll say we've got a total of 75 the measures that are putting out six tenths of a gallon per hour per you measure. So in one hour we're going to apply 45 gallons of water to that 100 square foot surface of that raised bed.

So basically three times twenty five three lines times 25 inventors each equals 75 emitters times zero point six gallons per hour per the measure comes out with 45 gallons. So if you water for one hour you have 45 gallons of water. Well is that enough or not. That's the question. Yeah all right well let's go back to our previous discussion about the one inch of rainfall in on the rough you're going to collect zero point six to three gallons. All right for that per square foot wear foot for one inch of rain. So you again go back 100 square feet. You multiply it times zero point six to three and you're coming out with. You need 62 gallons a week. You hear it raining. So if you divide. In this case the forty five gallons that we know we'd apply in one hour with our system to the sixty two gallons that we know we want to apply to make one inch of rain it comes out to be one point three eight hours

or approximately one hour and 23 minutes of water and would equal that one inch of rain. So you can put a timer on it actually. Yeah you could. And the other thing is you may want to have an up you. You may precisely want to know how much to put on because let's say you got half an inch of rain that week and you say well I want to put on a little bit more so you don't want to put on an equivalent of a whole inch of rain you want to factor in how much you got in your rain gauge and then figure how much you have to make up in order to make one inch of total moisture being put on the garden. Now you're talking about a raised beds today. I mean that one inch of rain does that still apply and in particular in using the intensive it method because it seems like your demand for the plants is higher does that also equate to demands for well more water. You know again I'm not a master gardener but one of the things that I do know is that intensive garden has plants closer together so they create a canopy that also acts as a basically a living mulch and have less

water evaporation from the soil than that point. That's really true. Wow. So you have to be a mathematician in order to be a partner. Well in this case it's seems they force you to do some at least some initial calculations. What about the maintenance of this kind of system when you're talking about all the filters and all those different connections that seems a little bit daunting for the average gardener. Or maybe it isn't maybe it's going to have to look at that as we look at continued job possibilities. Well I mean with the whole issue of global warming you know we don't know what's going to happen up here as far as rainfall. Are we going to have hotter summers I mean right is not going to be called Unwelcome The hotter summer. Yeah we've had a very cold spring and so that's really held up you know into the gardens and getting plants out and things. But I think we really need to look at you know what what is the most effective way to to water this to water the garden. And

I think that a drip irrigation system is one option. You can also go back to using simple barrels collecting the water and then either bucket it out through. You know putting it in some kind of a sprinkler can or you can put a sump pump in there and you can pressurize it and you can use an overhead oscillating type of system. There's lots of different options from from low tech and obviously at lower expense to high tech and higher expense. So whatever works to get your garden watered using the least amount of say city water if you live in the city well water if you don't have a deep well or in your case you have a really deep well but low low exit capacity. Welcome passerby. Yeah. Wow. Well how about a few web resources as you mentioned one as far as the not a fam dash us a dot com for drip irrigation systems you have a couple other resources or just got a

couple minutes to wrap up here. Well actually I was doing some research online today and I I found a site that has some basic information on pumps which is very helpful for irrigation pumps if that's if that's the direction you're going in. And that's W W W A G and D SU dot edu. And then there's a slash P UBS slash a g n g slash irrigate slash a key 1 0 5 7 w.. Or you can go to Google like I did and then irrigation pumps and this is one of the first hits that comes up on Google. I think that first part of it the age and the SU dot edu. You would probably be able to find it on their web page if you searched around a little bit right.

Yeah another source. Now when you go to net a fam they're going to give you information on what they provide but they don't sell it directly they sell it through a dealer network and one of the dealers that I've worked with in the past is a company called trickle IIS and its website is w w o Dot T R I C K L daish easy dot com. And when you get to that they'll be a menu on the left and you can click on all different kinds of things like horticultural irrigation role crop irrigation greenhouse irrigation turf irrigation and they'll have different systems. And they also have a different PDA philes that you can click on. It'll kind of give you a primmer on a lot of this nice. And there have also seen some good library books say again you can go and search out some drip irrigation systems and they're going to walk you through some of the photo process I don't have the titles unfortunately right at my fingertips but I do recall finding several books I was looking

at them last year and I pretty fasted a bit at the same time a little bit daunted so I'll be nice to be able to look at somebody else's system and there's a few people in the community that are using drip irrigation. It's a good idea including Joe and Mary Rose. Well Thanks Joe very very much. This is very very informative very illuminating encouraging. All those great things. Joe as you know he and his wife Mary are owners of a north light farm in hope and we're really very glad and fortunate to have you in the community. Things such Thanks for inviting me on a date. You've been listening to Northern gardening here on North Shore radio. That concludes our northern gardening program will be with you again the following week to talk about more gardening topics if you've got a gardening question issue that you'd like to have presented here on Northern gardening give us a ring at 3 8 7 10 70 or you can e-mail us at Boreal Boreal dot org. Thanks so much I've been your host policy and really glad to be with you and put those gardening

gloves back on and get out there enjoy the ground.