The goals of your garden irrigation system.

In order to create and maintain a perfect looking garden with healthy, vibrant planting you need to ensure that your garden gets the right level of watering. To ensure that your plants get good watering you may need to create an irrigation system that gives a steady, accurate and uniform level of watering as required.

An irrigation system can be as complicated as a couple of strategically placed sprinklers or as complex as a full underground irrigation sprinkler system. To make sure that you are giving your planting exactly the right levels of watering you can either consult an irrigation system company or a landscaping system, or if you have the required knowledge you could build your own irrigation system.

Things to consider when building a garden irrigation system.

The first and most obvious factor is how much water your plants need, but there are many different things that determine this. Some plants require more water than others and the surroundings of each plant will also play an important part. You need to ensure a uniformity of water spread that is right for your plants and for your soil type.

Different soil types have a different infiltration rate. An infiltration rate is the amount of water that a soil type can take per hour without creating run off. You should consider exactly how to manage the water run off, and at very least your beds should slope forwards so that any excess water can run off to the front of the beds avoiding over watering of your plants.

You need to consider the time of day that you are watering your plants. For instance, watering in the mid day sun will lead to scorching your plants; the water dries on the leaves and the rays if the sun are magnified through the water burning the leaves and depleting the nutrients they need to grow healthily.

Your irrigation is best set to water immediately after sunrise, when the wind is typically at it’s lowest although you should manage your irrigation system so it will perform just as well in the highest wind conditions you expect.

Set the pressure of your irrigation system so that it isn’t too high. High water pressure leads to small droplets of water being created which are easily blown by the wind; this adversely affects the uniformity of your watering leaving some areas with too much watering and other areas lacking the water they require to remain healthy.

Maintenance of your irrigation system.

Regular maintenance of your irrigation system is vital to continued growth and health in your garden. By running simple tests you can ascertain whether your system is still running at its very best. Alternatively, you can arrange with the company that installed your irrigation system to come out and do routine annual checks.

In order to check your irrigation system is running properly and efficiently, get hold of several flat-bottomed containers of the same size. Place each container evenly around the area you are testing, usually ten foot apart will suffice, but you can shorten this distance for a more accurate test. Now run your irrigation system for approximately 15 minutes and then measure the amount of water in each container using a plastic ruler. Each of the containers should have the same amount of water in, and if they have then everything is fine.

If one of your containers has an unequal amount of water when compared to the other containers then you should move the rest of your containers in to this area, shortening the distance between them considerably. Again run your system for 15 minutes; if necessary wait until the next day so as not to over water your plants. By using this process you should be able to tell exactly where is receiving more water and you will be able to amend your watering system accordingly.

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