Looks good Tom. Why do you hate the poly? I have perhaps 2000 feet of it around the property and has been flawless. Every fruit tree in the yard is on the system, all 125 of my blueberry bushes all my citrus. Curious why you don't like the poly?

Hi BR

I just don't like rolling it out and trying to get it to stay in place until it's finally buried, and punching the holes in it. As you can see I did run some lines inside the pool cage for the cukes and around the corner on top of the concrete for the onions, something that also would have been problematic with polytubing.

Tom

The trick is to fill it with water THEN roll it out. I use the 1/4 inch tubing off the main tubing and use a piece of 1/2 inch plastic electrical conduit with an angled hole in it and run the 1/4 inch tubing up through it to the spray heads, works great on the trees.

You did a first rate job, looks very nice.

Thanks.

I should have known to talk to you about tricks when working with polytubing. I'm so used to working with PVC pipe that this just made sense to me.

Tom

It looks amazing, Tom, but we expect nothing less.

My life has been made so much easier by the micro spray watering system. It's not particularly pretty, because it's not all buried under mulch in my yard, but I no longer spend hours hand watering.

I have been thinking how to water the eight Earth Boxes and the new six large containers for tomatoes....

On Cape Cod I am able to use soaker hoses, and spent last summer working on that "infrastructure". They last a long time up north.

Carol B. Sarasota

That Hunter Time Clock you used is a very nice item. I installed one about 5 months ago for the first time on a job. We rarely use battery operated clocks for my business but for a home owner who doesn't want to mess with electrical it is a very nice item. Easy to use. I vastly prefer pvp pipe with micro spray outlets over leaky pipes and poly pipes. Really good poly pipe is OK but most of the stuff on the market is only good for a few years. The sun likes to eat it up. If anyone is going to do a system like this be sure you use the heavy SCD 40 pipe over the thin stuff. UV rays eat PVC pipe and make it brittle, the SCD 40 simply by being thicker resists this better.

Tom

I just bought a microsprayer kit to replace my old soaker hoses that cracked last year. So I'm all ears for these tricks to make it easier to roll out!

Hi Tom,

I only use schedule 40 PVC for my water lines, although I do use the schedule 20 PVC for the air tubes in my top planter buckets.

Tom M

How available are these hunter valve controllers and how expensive?

Boy, I'm not getting back here much anymore, sorry. They are pricy new but if you watch *bay dutifully used ones like new can be snapped up occasionally for $25-35, which is a good deal ;-) They are superior for this kind of application.

This is a very helpful post! While I have an inground irrigation system that covers most of my front flower bed there is a portion under the mature crape myrtle tree that needs more water but I can't get regular irrigation lines in due to the crapes root system. I could chop through the roots but that would just encourage the tree to send up suckers everywhere I cut a root! I'm getting ready to put in a micro system to cover this are and also a small bed across the back of the house.

Tom, you're system looks great!

Kara

Hi Tom

Nice to see one of your very informative posts back! I always learn something from you, miss your posts...

Silvia

Tom, something that isn't entirely clear, at least to me:

Is this tied in to your home water system or a cistern/barrel system? I'm only curious as my own drip lines are tied in with my rain barrel which really only allows for using 1-2 gph bubbler emitters until I get a pump of some sort.

Wow, GW has made some changes, used to be you could not resurrect post over a year old. You could post a reply but the thread would not be back to the forefront of messages, like the old days...if you had linked the thread you could see the updated responses no one one else could :-( :-)

Thanks Kara and Silvia, I will pop in from time to time.

L2ME - sorry I was not clear, this is tied into my city water, 54lbs of pressure at the garden hose bib and 10GPM flow. A gravity fed rain barrel definitely would not have sufficient pressure for microsprinklers, I can run 60 heads sufficiently.

Tom