I've used .5 gph and 1 gph drippers on a timer. I've never had one clog up - maybe if your water is super hard? I ran the system all the way from the back of the house to the front - starting with my neighbors potted plants, my plants planted in a narrow strip along the back fence, everything I had planted on the south side of the house, across the front of the house (flowers) and the hanging planters I had on the front stoop. Worked great. Saved my neighbors plants as well as my own. I think I had it on a 30 minute timer - might have been 20 mins. I think I had a flow limiter as well. There was probably a screen at the input end as well. I got the parts at WalMart in Sidney OH - no other WalMart I've been to carries them. I'm sure other WalMarts do have them, just not where I was living at the time (WV, my dad lived in Sidney, so I bought the parts when I was visiting up there). I plan to set something similar up after we move in a couple of weeks, though I'm not sure where I'll get the parts yet. BTW I'm pretty sure it was Orbit - I could get tubing and parts separately so I could get just what I needed instead of having to buy a pre-packaged kit with too much of this and not enough of that, LOL!

Nate, No one can tell you how to water or when to water, but what you should know is that you cannot water on a schedule because you have no idea, day to day or week to week, what sort of rainfall Mother Nature will, or won't, send your way. If you set yourself up to water for an hour a day every other day, maybe that will work....but maybe it won't. The plants' watering needs vary too much to be put on a strict schedule. Everyone's watering routine will vary, based on many things: how much rain is or isn't falling, how hot it is and how much the heat is evaporating the moisture out of the soil or how fast the plants are transpiring moisture, etc. Different kinds of soil absorb and hold water differently. Clay soils, once wet, can hold water a long time, making it unnecessary to water them for a while, while sandy/silty soils may absorb the water better but then they also dry out more quickly. So, you have to tailor your watering scheme to the specific kind of soil you have as well as to how much water your plants are getting from rainfall. You cannot water by a schedule or by some sort of plan. It would be nice if somebody could say "water at 5 gpm for 90 minutes a day every third day in June, but increase it to 90 minutes every second day in July..." but real life doesn't work that way. No one, not you and not us, knows if you'll be getting 6" of rainfall in June or 1", and only you can watch your soil and see how quickly it dries out after receiving rain or after a set irrigation period. I don't even water my sandy soil areas at the same rate that I water my heavily-amended clay loam areas. You have to do what Ponderpaul and Larry both said....water according to whenever the plants need to be watered. You know, small tomato plants that are a foot tall in April have certain watering needs, but plants that are 6' tall and loaded with ripening tomatoes in June have entirely different needs. There is no cut-and-dried formula. You merely have to check your soil and water when it is dry. You can use a moisture meter (I saw some of them on the seed racks at Lowe's last week) or you can stick your finger down into the soil to see how dry or wet it is. With tomatoes, it is important that the soil be kept evenly moist. If you let the soil fluctuate back and forth from dry to wet you likely will have issues with blossom end rot. And, to be clear, moist soil is good and is desirable. Soggy, wet soil is not as it can lead to root problems and diseases. Also, tomatoes that are overwatered as the fruit ripens often have poor flavor, so you don't want to overwater your plants and have nothing but poorly flavored fruit as a result. If you have tomatoes growing in containers, once you have them set up in the containers and have set up a drip line system, you can put it on a timer. In fact, you likely will need to because containers may need to be watered during the day on a hot summer day while you are at work. Even when you put a drip system on a timer for your containers, you shouldn't just set it up and walk away and forget it. You need to check your container soil every day and make sure it is getting wet enough but also not getting too wet. I try to put containers on a dripline that are all the same size and are filled with a similar mix so that they have the same basic watering needs, but I have to watch the soil because some tomato plants suck up a lot more water than others. That is to be expected because some tomato plants still will get 6 to 8' tall in containers and will drink a lot of water, what smaller determinate or ISI types stay smaller and don't need as much water. I run emitters every few inches through most my beds and try to water the whole bed evenly. Here's why. If I had tomato plants 4' apart and only put emitters 1' away from each plant on either side or all 4 sides or whatever, then the soil that is farther away from the emitters would get dry and could, can and will wick away moisture from the wetter soil adjacent to it. So, you need to evenly water the whole bed to avoid the wicking effect. I also water the beds evenly because I companion plant smaller plants in the same beds. With practice and experience you'll figure out how your soil holds and releases moisture, and you'll be able to customize your watering accordingly. However, you cannot expect it to remain constant throughout the growing season. Take into account plant size, heat, evaporation and transpiration rates, the needs of plants loaded heavily with fruit, etc. Your plants needs will vary from year to year. In 2010 we had great rainfall in my county---almost 50" at our house and I barely had to water at all. In 2003, we had 19" of rain and I had to water a lot more. What worked in one year will not work in another year with different conditions, so you have to be flexible and constantly experiment to learn what works for your garden in your soil with your weather and with whatever stage your plants are at during that period. It sounds harder than it is. Check your soil (I suggest using a moisture meter). When the soil is drying out, water it. When it is moist, don't water until it dries out some. What matters is not so much what system you use or how many emitters you use (as long as you use enough of them at a rate that moistens all the soil evenly). What matters is that you give the plants adequate moisture when they need it and otherwise leave them alone. I have found more people overwater than underwater. It is part of a phenomenon commonly referred to as "loving your plants to death". I can tell that you are giving a great deal of thought and putting a lot of effort into doing everything right this year. That is admirable. However, you cannot garden "by a formula or a schedule". You have to garden intuitively, from your heart as well as from your brain. Trust yourself to check the soil, decide if it feels too wet, too dry or "just right", and be willing to make adjustments week to week or even day to day. Taking care of a garden is a lot like taking care of a newborn child. Everyone tells you what to expect, what to do, how to do it, etc. But, every child is different and every garden is different. My son was a light eater who never wanted to finish the amount of formula that "they" (the pediatrician, the books, the magazines, etc.) said a newborn child should drink. Nor did he particularly want to eat on a regular schedule. He wanted to eat when he was ready to eat, not when my clock said he ought to eat. My nephew was the opposite. He wanted to have the amount that the experts said he should, plus a whole lot more. He was hungry all the time. If you tried to feed him on a strict schedule, he threw a fit because he was hungry now! He needed more food and he needed it when he was hungry. What worked with my son did not work with my sister's son. Yet, both grew just fine and were happy and healthy. So, remember that with your garden---its needs are unique to it and may not be the same as what my garden, or Larry's or Ponderpaul's or anyone else's garden's needs are. Just focus on giving it what it needs when it needs it, and only you can observe it and figure out what those needs are and how to meet them. That is part of the mystery of gardening. This month we start our 15th year here in Oklahoma, and I have not done things the exact same way in any 2 years because each year throws different variables into the mix. It keeps life, and gardening, interesting, and is part of the challenge of being a gardener. Dawn

LCDollar, None of us can tell you how many emitters or how closely to space them because we do not know how well your soil holds moisture and only you can learn through trial and error what works for you. Nor do we know how many gallons per hour are moving through your system. There is great variation between the way water moves through different types of soil. I have mostly clay and it will hold moisture a long time, but at the sandy end of the garden the soil dries out more quickly. However, if I let the clay get too dry, it hardens and the water runs right off instead of being absorbed so I have to work to keep the soil evenly moist. I had to tailor my drip irrigation system to work with the different soils by using valves so I can cut off some parts of the system and only water parts of it at a time. Be careful not to water too much. I water about once a week for however long it takes for the moisture to work its way down deeply in the soil, and it isn't ever really that long...maybe an hour or so or maybe two hours if it is really hot and really windy. It is always better to water deeply less often than to water more often but shallowly. In typical spring weather I will water about once a week if it isn't raining at all or maybe once or twice a month (if needed) if we are getting regular rainfall but not enough rainfall for the plants to be happy. If you water often but shallowly, your roots stay right up there in the upper few inches of the soil which isn't the best thing in our climate. You want to water deeply so the roots will stretch down deep to use that moisture. Deep-rooted plants show less stress in the heat of the summer than those with shallow roots which dry out more quickly and also get hotter because they are so much closer to the surface of the soil. You don't want to keep your soil soggy, just evenly moist. Keeping it too wet will lead to all sorts of issues, including disease and plant death. Having the soil fluctuate from very wet to very dry can cause fruit quality issues. Tomatoes don't like very wet and soggy soil. They like moist to even slightly dry soil. I don't know how experienced you are at growing tomatoes, but if you are relatively new at them, you might not be aware that overwatering often gives you huge plants and large fruit with poor flavor. Genetically, the fruit only have a certain amount of flavor components. If you water a lot, it waters down the flavor and the tomatoes can have poor flavor and poor texture. The best tomatoes in the world in terms of flavor usually are dryland farmed with no irrigation, though that is really hard to do here in July and August about 9 years out of 10. I come as close to dryland farming as I can without actually letting the plants wilt from getting too dry. Plants will wilt not only if they are too dry, but also if their roots are getting too much water, so watch your irrigation system carefully and never assume that wilting means the plants are too dry. Always stick your finger down into the soil several inches (use a trowel to dig down a few inches if the soil is hard and compacted) to check for moisture when plants wilt. If they are wilting and the soil is moist, they don't need water. They are wilting either because the sunlight that day has been especially intense, the wind has been intense or their soil is too wet and they are suffocating. Nate, That is a whole lot of watering, so be careful or you'll end up with tasteless water bags instead of tasty tomatoes. Too much water is worse than too little, and watering on a schedule usually leads to too much water and kills the flavor. Dawn

See a blog where you can follow an experiment which is spending at least 10!!! times less water to grow vegetables in dry or very dry regions. Not only that, the solar drip irrigation (Kondenskompressor) purifies 'bad' water, which means that you can grow plants and vegetables sensitive to brackish or other unusable water. The best : It doesn't need electronics nor any other technical know-how, it's recycling and doesn't cost anything! Gratis for the entire world. The blog is written in spanisch, the how-to-do-it is available in english. http://kondenskompressor.blogspot.com