Step-by-step irrigation system installation tutorials
If you’re planting a new orchard, the irrigation decision usually comes down to drip versus micro-sprinklers. Everyone knows drip saves water. Fewer people talk about how often micro-sprinklers are the better tool on sandy soil, in frost-prone areas, or under…
You walk into a greenhouse and every plant gets exactly the same amount of water. The tomatoes in the back corner, the basil on the middle bench, the seedlings on the propagation table. Same dripper flow rate, same run time,…
If you walk into any irrigation supply shop and ask for “drip emitters,” you’ll get three different answers depending on who’s behind the counter. That’s because “emitter” means different things to a row-crop farmer laying miles of disposable tape, a…
Most drip irrigation sits on top of the soil. You can walk the rows, spot-check emitters, see the dry patch when something clogs. Subsurface drip irrigation buries everything. The drip tape or drip line goes 4 to 18 inches underground,…
If your irrigation pump cycles on and off every time someone opens a valve, you’re burning through electricity and killing the motor. A pressure tank stops that. It stores pressurized water so the pump doesn’t have to run for every…
I once watched a farmer spend $4,200 replacing a mainline he’d installed six months earlier. The pipe hadn’t cracked from frost or tractor weight. It had imploded, collapsed inward like a soda can. The culprit wasn’t bad pipe. It was…
Most drip irrigation guides assume you’re working with a nice rectangle. Flat ground, straight edges, rows that run parallel for 300 meters. That’s not what most small and mid-sized farms actually look like. I’ve seen fields shaped like guitar picks,…
A drip irrigation system at the wrong pressure burns money two ways: too high and you destroy hardware, too low and you destroy yield. I’ve seen emitters launch off tubing like tiny bottle rockets, and I’ve seen lines where the…
Most farmers spend hours comparing drip tape prices and emitter specs, then sketch their system layout on the back of a napkin. I’ve watched this play out on farms from Kenya to California. The result is almost always the same:…
Every time it rains on your barn roof, you’re watching free irrigation water slide into the ditch. A 2,000 square foot roof in a region that gets 30 inches of annual rainfall collects about 37,000 gallons a year. That’s enough…
