Irrigation

I suppose it’s pretty hard to grow a field of cut flowers in most places with only Mother Nature’s rain for moisture, and northern Michigan is definitely no exception.  Through the years  I have been collecting drip irrigation things, as the budget allowed, to put together a system that will do the job but conserve water as much as possible.

A new roll of drip tape was in the cards this year, and below you can see it being deployed.  I basically just clamped a pipe to the tractor bucket to allow for twist-free unrolling.

Unrolling Driptape

The drip tape and tubing all go together pretty easily with no tools needed, other than a sharp knife to cut them to length.  It does take some force to push the tubing into the compression tees or couplings (and even more when you want to pull them back apart), but if a geezer like me can do it, how hard can it be?

It’s typical to use tubing to make a header, and have the individual drip tapes go down each row from there.  Sometimes tees are used, with a drip tape adapter on each tee, as shown below.

Compression tees w/hose fitting plus tape adapter

Another way to attach the drip tape runners to the header is one that I have tried this year for the first time.  Rather than use a tee and a drip tape adapter at each junction, a hole is punched in the tubing and a barbed adapter is snapped into the hole.    The pic below shows the punch, the adapter, and a couple of junctions.

Punch, adapter and runners

And … with the water flowing, we have drippage.

Yep, drippage