Gardening: Website offers calculator to help optimize your sprinkler system
Happy April everyone! It’s nice to have an early spring for a change. Unfortunately, spring will fade into summer and the unknown. Our winter has been dry and if the summer heat arrives early, we will have to start watering early.
Drip irrigation is the most efficient way to water ornamental and vegetable beds. The water gets right to the roots without throwing water all over the place. On a hot, windy day, a conventional sprinkler can lose as much as 50 % of the water to evaporation before it hits the plants.
One of the biggest challenges to using a drip irrigation system is setting the run time. “There are so many variables that go into the decision,” says Linda Ly of the Garden Betty website (gardenbetty.com). “First, there is your soil type, followed by your garden’s exposure to sun and wind and ending with the water requirements of your plants. For the drip system itself there is the square footage of your garden, the gallons per hour of your drip system heads produce and the amount of water needed to meet your plant’s needs.” Makes you want to go, “Huh?”
To bring order to this chaos, Ly has developed an easy-to-use calculator that will take the guess work out of setting your run time.
You will need to know the square footage of the area to be watered. Next you will need to know the output in gallons per hour of the heads or openings of your drip system. This information should be on the packaging or stamped on the heads when you buy them. Lastly, you will need to know how much water your plants need per week.
Ly has a table on her website that gives an estimate as a starting point. The table also has estimates for seasonal changes, plants will need more water in hot weather than in cool seasons. “These numbers are estimates, a starting point,” says Ly. “They will help you adjust to your optimum time.” The calculator can be found on her website: gardenbetty.com/drip-irrigation-calculator.
To use the model, plug in the square footage being watered by the system. If you have multiple timers, each will need its own square footage. Next, enter the estimated weekly water requirement for your plants from Ly’s table divided by the number of watering you plan to do a week. Lastly, plug in the gallons per hour per emitter multiplied by the number of emitters on the system. There are many styles of emitters out there and each will be different. Ly prefers using drip tape, which is a long, flattened tube with openings every few inches. The number the calculator generates will be the time the system needs to run at each watering.
Ly cautions that this is a starting point. You will have to adjust it for your particular garden. She recommends sticking your index finger in the ground a few hours after watering to check the moisture depth and adjust accordingly.