Typical well designed spray irrigation will at best be ~ 60% efficient WRT water utilization. Atomization in air, overspray, runoff, and surface water evaporation create the water loss and decrease efficiency. Most systems are so poorly maintained and not adjusted for seasons that this numbers is significantly lower. Typical well adjusted drip systems are more than 90% efficient with water use. Even when they are not adjusted for season, they conserve more water than even a fine tuned spray system. The challenge with drip is two-fold: 1. It is usually more labor intensive to deploy and maintain. 2. To meet the high efficiency number you must do a lot of figuring and arithmetic to design the system correctly. To the second point; A proper design requires: a) Calculating the daily amount of water each type of plant needs during the hottest, driest month. b) Determining the water holding capacity of the soil. c) Deriving from above data the best schedule for achieving the least frequent deep watering of the plant root zones while providing their daily need of water. If you spend a few rainy cold winter days figuring these things out, it can pay great dividend come growing season with healthy happy stress free plants.

I use the irrigation drip and love it. From time to time a dripper will get clogged, all you have to do is take it off and let the water rush through the opening and then put it back on. I have learned the hard way not to use any of the spray nozzels, just go with the 1 gallon per hour pressure compensating drippers. I wouldn't actually use a kit, just get the 1/2" main line tubing, the 1/8" tubing that reaches to each individual shrub, and the 1/8" soaker tubing for perennials. Then get enough 1 gallon PC drippers to reach all of the shrubs and you are set. I've got them everywhere, the oldest set is 4 years old and still working. The most used ones are in the rose gardens, one is 3 years old, the other is 1 year old. I turn them on once a week for a few hours or so during the heat of the summer. The roses love it. Many other shrubs don't need that much water. The only big problem I've had is that every once and a while some critter will knaw on the 1/2" line trying to get to the moisture. This results in a fine mist being shot out of the line every time the water is turned on. It's easily fixable, just cut the line and take out the knawed part and put a 1/2" connector in to connect the hose. M

I use gravity feed for my garden. If you want to lay drip lines and all of those other fancy attachments for shop bought irrigation you need to find out the litres per minute where your garden tap is. Get a 9 litre bucket, run the tap on full and when it is running fast fill the bucket and time it to see how long it takes to fill then work out the litres per minute. Here is the formula Litres per minute = 9 litre bucket x 60 seconds -------------------------------------- Time to fill the bucket So for the first line 9 x 60 = 540 Time to fill bucket say 10 seconds Divide 540 by 10 seconds which means that you have 54 litres per minute. Now if a sprinkler uses 2 litres per minute you can have 27 of them. If a dripper uses 1 litre you can have 54 of them. Or you can mix and match, using what you want to as long as the total does not go over the maximum of your litres per minute. (If you use gallons or pints change litres to what you use. The fittings from a shop should tell you how many pints? of water are used a minute) Now having said all of that, I don't use the shop bought attachments! Instead I run alkathene (low pressure irrigation pipe) under the mulch and with a fine drill bit, I have drilled holes where I want the water to come out, effectivly drip feeding each individual plant. If you do this, make sure that the holes are on the side of the hose and not the bottom so that the little holes do not get clogged up when the hose is turned off and there is a back suction. Also I do not have any lines that have an end, instead they all join up to form a grid - this also helps to keep the presure equalised. Those lines that run around my garden are flat - there is not any slope there. One other thing to get the pressure as high as possible, I use 25mm main line to my garden tap - it is not until the hose on the tap that the line reduces to 15mm which helps with the pressure. I used to reduce the 25mm line feeding the tap connection to 15mm just before the connection, but when I changed it to 25mm going into the tap connection the pressure from the garden hose increased :D If your garden tap is not right next to your garden, extend the line and put one in - as the longer you have water running through large pipes, the better the pressure at the other end. Gravity feed is brilliant and works well. It is easy to add in lines and make changes and it is such a great feeling when it works as you want it to. My tanks are ony about 100m away from the garden. Good luck!

Ok so no one has really answered this question effectively yet. Let me start by saying I am a full time vegetable farmer on ten acres using fertigation on everything. The size of your plot will have a significant financial start up cost, but it will be worth it in the long run. Most of the initial investments are one time purchases like mainlines, valves, pressure regulators, end closures, timer, TDS meter, fertilizer injector, and pressure gauges for the mainline There are several questions I would need to know for sure to effectively respond, but here is a basic rundown. You will need for starters, a TDS meter available for $20-30 at most home improvement stores. You will need to know your gpm from the well pump, and as close to exactly how many feet of drip tape you have. Are you laying under plastic or mulch? Burying the drip tape? Laying on top of the dirt? Do you have a 7 day timer? .25gph drip is a little lower than most standard vegetable tapes. Usually .34 or .45 is used on gardens, because 1 hour a day for 7 days is 1” of water like most plants require. However, how you lay the drip tape affects how long you run the system. With most liquid fertilizers imjected through an EZ flo system, the target is to get to around 700ppm over your usual ppm. So if you use a TDS meter and it reads 100ppm with just the water, you will need to adjust the fertilizer input to get a reading of 800ppm. This is done different ways you can adjust the mixing rate on the EZ Flo, you can adjust the fertilizer solution before adding it to the system, or you can adjust the values higher or lower with an inline ball valve, but that’s a more advanced method so skip that one. How you design the system using the timer will change how you need to adjust the values if you run it for 4 hours every five days, you will want a slightly higher value, say 850-900ppm as compared to around 700 with an everyday watering. At no point with fertigation should you be running straight water once crops are starting to bloom. Allow the rain to be your fresh water source, and use the drip for maximum value When it comes to fertigation, you cannot just guess with it. It is absolutely critical to know all components of your system, but the yields compared to traditional growing are not even comparable. I’m talking 3-4 times greater yield on most plants!!! your EZ flo will come with a standard set of instructions but they don’t mean anything until you know all those other factors listed above. You may have to install a white flo disc or a red flo disc, or you may have to run the garden in multiple zones. Probably the most critical thing though of anything, is to remember with drip you are thinking in terms of hours, NOT minutes. Running in minutes will cause crops to die. I recommend you check out Urban Farm Fertilizers if you are going to be using an EZ Flo system as the numbers above are based on my uses on nearly every vegetable crop available for consumption by the public. Youll also need some food coloring to add to the EZ Flo system so you can see when you run out of fertilizer. As far as how much...you have to know the numbers above. Period. Generally with my mainline ez Flo system it is diluted one gallon of fertilizer to 2800 gallons of water to achieve the correct ppm. For cover crops and leafy stuff it’s diluted even further to nearly 7000 gallons to one gallon fertilizer. Let me know if you need anymore help with this set up.