Drip irrigation a bargain for home vegetable gardens
By ROBERT N. BREWER, JR. EXTENSION TIPS

Every summer it fails to rain at least sometime when your landscape plants, home orchard and vegetable garden desperately need it. Those are the times that make drip irrigation a terrific value. Drip irrigation uses a lot less water than sprinklers. It uses 30 percent to 50 percent less water on foundation plantings and other shrubs. And it probably saves 25 percent or so on gardens.

Drip, is a low-pressure type of irrigation that applies trickles of water, through calibrated emitters from plastic tubing, directly to plants' roots. You have almost no evaporation loss with drip irrigation. You also use less water because you're only watering the root zone of the plants you want to water. You're not watering all the weeds around too.

In a sense, then, drip irrigation helps stretch your water by doing more for your plants with less water. To make it even better, a typical system doesn't cost much and it simple to install.

To put in a system, first talk to somebody who can tell you exactly what you need. You can get information from the county agent or from irrigation suppliers or garden centers.

For shrubs in border areas and foundation plantings or for home orchards, drip systems have emitters wherever there is a plant to be watered. So no two drip systems are likely to be quite the same. That's why you need the county extension agent, irrigation or garden center to help you decide just what supplies you need.

When you have the supplies you need it's fairly simple to install the system. It's not that hard to do. In most cases you could put in a system to do foundation plantings in a couple of hours.

With most drip systems, you don't have a lot of buried pipes, except with home orchards. Wherever you have pipes going across your lawn, you'll want to bury them. for shrubs in foundation plantings, though, you can just put the tubing under the mulch.

Drip systems can be quick to install in home gardens, too. There, most systems use thinwalled tubing or "tape" with regularly spaced outlets. This is the same product farmers use to irrigate commercial vegetables. You can put in a drip system to water a 50- by 100- foot garden in a couple of hours. And you can run the system off a water hose. You can water up to a quarter-acre at a time off a single garden hose.

Whether you're watering a garden, your shrubs or a home orchard, a drip irrigation system can enable to turn a faucet once an forget how hot and dry it is. So you not only save water, which saves you money, but you save time too. Drip irrigation really is a bargain.