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Design help for 50x50 veg garden.

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Sprinkler Warehouse Addict

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Wednesday, May 15th 2013, 2:16pm

Design help for 50x50 veg garden.

Picture a 50 foot by 50 foot square. In the centre is a 13 x 13 greenhouse. The rest is all raised beds, and 3 foot wide pathways.
So , roughly 1/2 of the 50 x 50 is planted garden, the rest is paths and greenhouse.

Around the perimeter, and starting from the greenhouse.... I ran a 1/2 inch black poly pipe. Connectors where the joins were needed, every 100 feet.

So really this is like a big garden hose right now. I will cap the end and then I want to put driplines in off the 1/2"poly pipe.

Question is, how many can a person run before you have no pressure. I'd rather have fewer that work than a lot that don't.

I have good water pressure. But still. There has to be a limit. Is there a way of calculating this so that a novice can learn?
A formula...
If you have the time to answer this, like back in school, please show your work, so I can try to learn, and not bother you again needlessly.

Also, I have a water barrel for rain water. i'd like to do the same with it. How would you go about this? Max distance, max driplines, etc... it is not pressurized only gravity fed.
If I need parts, please identify for me which ones so I can buy them here.

thanks in advance
Sue

Ocelaris

New Member

Posts: 7

2

Wednesday, May 22nd 2013, 9:49am

check out irrigationtutorials.com for instruction. But you'll have to calculatate the GPM per dripper and basically depending on your size of your system split it up into zones.

Drip tape might be a good idea if you have row crops, but if you're targeting individual plants, individual drip emitters are my preference to get right at the root zone. We had gigantic plants with our drip system, 2-3 emitters per big tomato/pepper plant.

Rain barrels typically are useless unless they are huge, i.e. thousands of gallons in a location where you don't have city water. Think remote site with a pond a hundred feet away from the rain barrel. Basically, you don't want to go there, it's a wasted effort, use it for spot watering or making Compost tea etc... but realistically it's not a feasible option if you have city water. The pressure of rain barrel is typically so low that you would need a pump or a separate low pressure system, i.e. low pressure drip tape etc...

If you have your beds pretty heavily planted, I would say just rough estimate 20x20 would be as large of a zone as I would do... I had roughly 40x40 area in our last house on 3 seperate 1/2 drip lines, and it worked... no calculations, just seperated by different types of plants, i.e. raised beds on one, perennial beds in the sun on another, and roses on a 3rd. Personally, I would just split your 50x50 section into 4 parts and go from there, use drip end timers and call it a day. Just make sure to use a backflow preventer and good filter off of the main supply. I got a 4x hose splitter and that got me 3 hose end timers + a garden hose, with the filter ahead of that. Backflow preventer highly reccomended ahead of the filter!

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