When planning for our raised garden beds, we reviewed many types of available irrigation systems. In a nutshell – here is what we learned.

Watering Can: It’s traditional and has the added health benefit of physically  transporting water.

Garden Hose with Sprayer: Fast and efficient – hoses can become entanglement headaches.

Metered Irrigation (Spray Heads): Excellent coverage for lawns and gardens, programmable scheduled on/off, inefficient on windy days, foliage watering vs. roots, significant moisture loss due to evaporation.

Metered Irrigation (Drip Heads): Efficient for direct spot watering of individual plants, trees and shrubs, programmable scheduled on/off, minimal evaporation, root watering vs. foliage, inefficient for watering large areas.

Metered Irrigation (Drip Hose): Efficient for garden bed and row watering. Programmable scheduled on/off, minimal evaporation, root watering vs. foliage.

On our homestead, we harvest rain water off the roof into rain barrels. We also have an automated system that combines spray heads, drip heads and drip hoses for backup during the dry spells .

For our system we connected drip hoses in the raised garden beds to 3 gallon plastic buckets (recycled from our grocery store). Using a small electric utility pump placed into the full rain barrel and attached to a garden hose we quickly fill each of the irrigating buckets. The buckets slowly feed the water through the drip hose saturating the garden beds with no-cost nourishing rainwater.

Photo featured on garden grab  www.gardengrab.co.uk

Save time and energy – take a baby step and make an irrigation system for your garden.