DIY water saving drip irrigation system

Water and lack thereof is a huge talking point in this day and age of “Climate Change”. By changing your watering technique you can improve your watering effectiveness, save you time and save some money in water bills.

Over the past couple of months we’ve been adding to our new large garden bed. We’ve put in plants such as Passionfruit, a lemon tree, Moses in the cradle, honeysuckles, ponytail tree, marigolds, vinca, lavender etc. All of these plants have different water requirements, but to help preserve what goes on, it has all been mulched with hay, and some parts have been covered with horse manure to help the hay break down into a nice rich topsoil / compost / mulch.

I’ve been using my standard watering sprinkler which puts out a whopping 990 liters per hour over a large area. It takes 4 moves of the sprinkler to get the whole area covered, and it is easy to forget to move it, and some areas get neglected from time to time.

Working with small scale irrigation systems is quite easy, even for the first timer who has no experience. Your basic setup requires a few key materials and a little common sense.

For our setup I bought fifty meters of 13mm hose, two T pieces, a hose adapter, a filter (to stop the drippers blocking) with pressure reducer (keeps it at 100 bar), and some drippers.

Overall it only took 30 minutes to install. The first step was to lay the hose out in the desired pattern, cut and fit joiners where required. Next attach the hose and fill with water, take the hole making tool and start installing the drippers.

Each of my drippers run at 4 litres per hour, I used these on the larger plants such as the lemon tree, passionfruit vine and other larger dedicated plants.

To make placement easier, I used some smaller 4mm flexible hose to attch to the main 13mm hose. This allows me to move them around the base of the tree as required.

Over my anuals (which will be replaced with perennials when the current perennials grow to be a bit bigger) I used a small rotating sprinkler head. Using upright raisers to get them above the mulch, they spin around distributing water over a larger area. The exact water usage from these is unknown at the moment, but should they begin putting out too much water, I can easily add taps to their raisers and they can be turned off.

The best part of creating your own drip irrigation system is that it can be modified at any time for little cost, once the initial financial outlay has been done.

By completing this job, my household water consumption should drop significantly thus reducing my water bill. Along with the installation of the low water toilet bowl and dual flush cistern in the bathroom, I’m taking the first step top making my house even greener.

For more information on DIY Watering systems you can visit:

• DIY Network
• Irrigation Tutorials
• Gardening Australia

Get HomelyCapers via your favorite Feed Reader

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

I planted out a tray of Green Mignonette lettuce about 2 weeks ago, I tried to do the right thing and separate them all out and plant them in rows. Having run out of room to spread them out, with the left over plants I simply slid them out of their tray into a spot in the garden.
Since then they have both been given the same water and nutrients, yet the separated ones have grown far slower.

I think *and hope* that when it comes to picking time, the separated lettuces have performed better than their sardine like cousins who are squished in together.

I’m not sure if I’ve spoken about my veggie patch before? If not, then here is a quick rundown for you all.
It’s about 3m x 10m and is fenced off from the rest of the yard by a 4ft fence. When we moved in it was overgrown with weeds (thistles in particular), so after a lot of pulling and cleaning I found that the soil there was less than average and very sandy.

Having all good intentions of making loads of compost, I started dumping the lawn clippings into a heap at one end. This has now turned into a huge pile of grass clippings (not compost). Today I spread it all out and have began watering it and will add some horse manure to it and stir it up a little to kill the little weed seeds that are living in there.

So now it’s onto the contents. I’ve got 6 cabbages that have began to head up nicely. There are three tomato’s, some very small spring onions, some Pak Choy, lettuces, a couple of Chinese broccoli and one pumpkin.

Over the summer time there will be a shade house erected to protect them all from the 40+ degree (Celsius) days.

Underneath the straw (kinda hard to see) is about 15 dwarf snap beans, more spring onions, spinach, coriander, lettuce and some baby carrots.

After planting my new lemon tree last week, I set out to find how to fertilise it and get it to grow to it’s best potential.

There is plenty of info out there for lemon & citrus trees, but nothing as complete or concise as that at Aussie Organic Gardening.

The blog post is so good, I’m not even going to paraphrase any of it.

If you have a citrus tree, check their blog out. I’ve also added the blog to my RSS reader to keep getting their updates.

In short, Espalier is the name given to a technique of growing trees into a two dimensional flat plane by grafting, pruning and training.

The espalier technique was developed in Europe in the 16th century to help temperate climate fruit grow in cooler climates, by growing them flat against a sunny wall. Gardening Australia has a great Fact Sheet on Espalier.

Any shrub or bush can be espaliered, but popular species include:

• Olives
• Citrus (orange, lime, lemon)
• Camellias
• Gardenia

You might be surprised, but growing a tree in an espalier fashion is easy to do at home.

Finding the location and setting up is the most challenging part. The tree will need to be grown on some kind of sturdy trellis. If you choose a wall, simply attach some horizontal tensioned wires about 30cm apart, they are going to have to take some weight so ensure they are well secured.
Some kind of clips will be required to hold the branches being trained to the wires, soft spongy plastic ties can be bought at your garden center.

Before you plant your tree, look at it from all angles. It is best to plant it with the most horizontal branches to line up with the wall. The other unwanted branches can be pruned back to keep the tree flat.

It is going to take some care and time to keep your tree under control, especially during the growing season so keep your secateurs handy.

There are a number of different styles of espalier you can try.

Palmette Verrier

Six Grid

Tripler Vertical U Shape

The Fan

Belgian Fence

Another trip to the nursery on the weekend saw us come home with a swag of new plants, one of them being a lemon tree.
After choosing a nice looking specimen the lady at the nursery asked what it’s primary use was.

My fiance was not impressed when I told her that all I wanted was a lemon tree to pee on. (Peter Cundall recommends it!)

After working out that we would be using the lemons for cooking, the variety I had chosen (Meyer) was not the ideal variety as it does not set very well (in cheesecake etc).
I ended up with a Eureka lemon, which is very similar to the old Lisbon variety with fewer thorns. Here are some more differences between the lemon varieties.

After digging a large hole (about 1.5 times as deep as the roots and 5 times the diameter) and mixing in some dolomite to sweeten the soil, the tree was in the ground. The nursery lady said not to touch the roots as lemon’s do not like that.

A good water and a bit of sunshine later the lemon tree is looking fantastic. All I need to do is wait for the lemons to make some lemon cordial!

With the rising cost of fuel and food, many Australians are going back to growing a vegetable garden in their back yard to help reduce their household expenditure.

Horticulturalist and Assistant Retail Manager of Eden Gardens has recorded that over the past year the sales of fruit and vegetable seedlings has risen 50% on the previous year, while sales of regular garden plants had stayed stable, indicating that more families are growing their own to save some money.

Most people have come to the realisation that the world oil price is staying high, and rather than sacrifice good quality vegetables people have turned towards growing vegetable gardens to ease the financial burden that increased fuel costs and drought have brought.

The Diggers Club, a group who grow and sell organic heirloom fruit and vegetable seeds formed in 1978, marketing manager Lisa Remato says that in an area of 10 square metres you can grow enough vegetables for one person.

A lot of keen home gardeners have known this for years, I have only began to branch out into growing fruit in the past 8 months with a passionfruit vine (I’ve had many a lemon tree!). My biggest challenge has been moving to a new climate which has very hot summers that burn off alot of my vegetable crops.

The Diggers Club are offering health-care card holders (lower income families) a package of seeds for $19.40 which should be able to grow over two tonnes of food! 350kg of pumpkins, 1025kg of tomatoes, 619kg of cucumbers, 9kg of peas, 200 heads of brocoli, 100 bunches of silverbeet, 8kg of beans, 700 lettuces, 1200 carrots, 300 parsnips and 300 onions!

That’s a lot of food, and when compared to buying it at the supermarket it’s really cheap if you’re up for a little work each week.

The biggest problem that the world faces is that there is a generation of people out there who have no idea how to grow vegetables. It is great to say that people could grow two tonnes of food, but it’s the knowing how to do the job that counts.

I’ll leave you all on a modified anecdote

Give a person a basket of vegetables and he will eat for a day, teach a person how to grow vegetables and he will eat for a lifetime.

Share your gardening knowledge with everyone, and you will both be rewarded.

It was a month and two days since I potted up the seedlings I bought and blogged about in the Cheap Plants post.
The time had come to plant them out in my garden around the pond.

Over that month both the Vinca and the Hypoestes have grown fantastically strong root systems which will put them in good stead in the wilderness of my garden.

Here are a couple of photo’s of them prior to planting and in their final location.

I hope that they will grow quickly to fill the area with a sea of colour. You can see part of my feature rock next to the pond!

Yesterday I went out to a granite outcrop near my house to collect some rocks to decorate around the pond that I installed a couple of months back. I managed to collect about 50 nice sized pieces and one very large feature rock.

Anyway, on returning I found there to be a swarm of mosquito larvae living in the water in my pond! The photo at that size does not show them that well (follow the link and you’ll see it bigger) but the little black specs are mosquito wrigglers.

Living in northern Queensland (Australia) where diseases like Ross River Fever and other mosquito borne diseases are rampant, the best thing I can do for the environment and my neighbors was to rid them from my pond.

Enter team mosquito control

My father suggested that I put a couple of drops of kerosene on the surface. The kerosene would cover the surface and prevent the wrigglers from getting any oxygen (they have no gills and need to come to the surface to breathe).
Nice idea, but I hoped to put fish in the pond one day and did not want to harm them.

A quick search around the net found that goldfish or guppies would eat the larvae and make a dent in the population.

Off to the pet shop to buy some fish! My fiance selected 4 small goldfish (two were black with bulging eyes) to go to fish paradise and eat themselves into big goldfish.

Mosquito control is everyone’s responsibility. Ensure that you check any standing water around your house (rain barrels, buckets, bird baths etc) for wigglers to prevent the spread of mosquitoes.

After discussing gardening with an old bloke at work a few months back, he gave me a small jar with some bean seeds in it and told me that they would be the best beans that I would ever eat. The original parent seeds were reported to have come from Italy about 10 years ago, seed has been saved and kept in the family for that time. I feel that I am very lucky to have been allowed to grow these special beans.

I felt a bit like Jack from Jack and the Bean stalk, except I didn’t have to sell my cow or upset my mother. I came home and planted them out and watched them grow.

I’m not sure if they’re called snake beans because the beans look like snakes or the plants grow up the support I gave them like snakes… I think it may be both.

Now they’re about two meters in height (6ft 8in) and are beginning to flower, except the nice healthy leaves have turned a yellow colour in the past few days.

Can anyone help?

There are some great Snake Beans being grown over at Balcony Greens