Gardena Micro Irrigation Set Up.

Good morning everybody!
I got money for Christmas so I decided to buy a Gardena Micro Irrigation Set to rig up in my garden/greenhouse. It should of been £60 but I got it for £40 in the garden center sale!

Any way I have bought a few accessories to clip on to the pipes etc but I was just wondering if anybody has one and how they are getting on with it?, Any tips?, Do's and dont's!

I know for a fact I'm going to need to buy some more supply and connecting pipe and possibly more connectors, its going to be expensive but it's definitely going to be worth it in the long run!

 

I've never used it, but I have decided to add an auto irrigation system to my garden. Thanks for the tip Kayleigh!

 

If you need more hosepipe, check out the pound shops before you buy an expensive one.

 

Oooh, which one did you go for? Let me know how you get on with it

 

I have a generic irrigation kit - ie clone - of this one.
I decided not to cut the pipe to the exact length but to leave some slack so I can move the pots the stakes/water feeders were in. My kit had 16 water outlets and I have 16 pots in a 4x4 pattern. Instead of cutting the pipe exactly to length, I cut the whole pipe in 16 parts which left quite a lot of excess piping so now I can use the same pipe in a larger format. If I need to use a smaller format, I can put more than one water outlet per pot.

Also I have a large water sprayer bottle (9litres) and I use the irrigation pipe (above) in the sprayer so that once I pump it up, I can leave it to empty by itself while I do other jobs. I figure it's better to spend time examining plants rather than watering - so while that's doing the water job, I am looking at the plants.

 

I already have over a hundred metres of pipe, so what I'm after are the connectors (T pieces especially) and a pressure regulator.

 

longk - is it connected to the tap? If so, the tap can be the pressure regulator.
Additionally, with it being so long, it might be an idea to fit a Y adapter to the tap and have both ends of a long run of pipe feed into each arm of the Y connector so that water pressure does not drop off from a single water inlet feeding into a long pipe run.

 

It will be buried and used to soak the soil from below (less evaporation) during dry (!?) periods, so I need a preset output pressure.

My garden gets very dry quickly (even last year!) for three reasons;
1] I have a large Taxodium disticum which is a complete moisture leach!
2] Next door has two very large conifers which also suck all the moisture out at the top end of the garden.
3] Being at the edge of the ice flows in the last ice age we're sat on top of huge gravel fields!

What I have is the very thick placcy pipe used in ground source heating. I also have the best part of another 100m stored at work too.

 

For the last couple of years I've got all my irrigation stuff from http://www.cityirrigation.co.uk/ as they were cheapest (but worth checking each season in case someone is undercutting them ) Service has always been good.

Somewhere I have a link to a blog that I read that had a lot of good information - such as attaching the drippers to the distribution pipe and then attaching the spaghetti to the dripper, rather than the other way around, so that the pressure was more even. And trying to wind the distribution pipe close to the plants, rather than using a "straight" distribution pipe and using spaghetti to reach each plant. Also use same rate drippers on a given section, and put two drippers on a plant if you need twice as much water (rather than mixing 1x and 2x rate drippers). That's also important for cherished / pot plants - i.e. have 2+ drippers per plant in case one blocks (you'll see in nurseries that they usually have 2-per-plant for that reason).

Stick some spaghetti up your tree ferns to water the crowns regularly too.

Clogging is the enemy, hard water doesn't help in that regard.

 

If I had a system that watered my garden, it would render me surplus to requirements!!

 

I acquired 3 water butts to sublime t my 1, the 3 were originally linked together at the bottom.
So am using the one with a tap for a drip feed for my polytunnel, the bottom link will be blocked off.
The other 2 will be linked to my original butt, as this has a pump in to power a hose pipe.

Good tip unplug the pump when you've used it, unlike me who has an empty water butt as it pumped it out until the floats cut off the supply.

 

Hi Kayleigh, I use the Gardena system in 2 greenhouses and a polytunnel. From personal experience: Worth shopping around to get PLENTY more drips and also the rubber stoppers to close holes in main pipe when you have put them in the wrong place! ALWAYS use their orange device for making the holes - do not try to use anything else because they will probably leak. The little sticks to hold the pipes in place don't bed in very well in light compost, so you could find yourself irrigating the floor, so consider extra stiff wire U shapes as well. If you are watering greenhouses, the mist heads are good. Make sure you have quick access to the tap, because when setting it up you need to turn it on, check where it sprays, turn it off, move the pipes and repeat. You will get very wet...
I also use a control unit connected to the tap with 2 separate hose lines and separate timers, so the greenhouses can be watered to different degrees. Then in the autumn I drain the controller and take it indoors.
Hope that helps