SMART IRRIGATION

Plants need water like we need blood, and my raised vege gardens are good for many reasons, but they do dry out quickly. I don’t have time to stand holding a hose regularly so have set up an automatic fertigation system.

This allows me to put my compost tea into an old water filter canister that I’ve connected to the waterline so that it is distributed to my raised gardens when watering.

My gardens are small and round, so I have a hose circling the edge of the gardens and use various sprinkler heads. I have some moveable ones on a stake with a short flexible hose, which are good, but my favourites are a spider of arrow drippers recycled from an orchid grower. These are on short lengths of flexible hoses and poke into the ground beside the seedling and deliver water under my mulch, directly to the roots.

After experimenting with various expensive automatic timers – which needed batteries and setting up 24 hours before you could use them – which all failed and finally burst with an early frost, I now use a simple cheap timer switch. I simply fill up my compost tea, switch it on for 15 minutes, and it switches itself off. Job done.