How to Conserve Water in a Vegetable Garden

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Plants that are suited to your environment won’t need a lot of watering over and above what Mother Nature gives them for free. However, even the most drought tolerant native plants need to be watered on a regular basis their first year in the ground. Most plants do best when they have a regular, consistent source of water. Drip irrigation with inexpensive soaker hoses is an easy, effective way of giving your plants water when and where they need it: at their root zone. Drip watering prevents up to 70 percent less wasted water than conventional sprinklers. Because you deny water to areas that don’t need it, you can prevent weeds because there is little or no wasteful runoff. All you have to do is turn on the hose that connects your drip system to a faucet and let it run for an hour or so when needed.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

Purchased black soaker hose(s)
Regular garden hose(s)
Earth staples or rocks (optional)

Step1

Decide where you will set up your soaker hose watering system. Most hoses are sold in 50-foot lengths, so measure the area you need to cover and purchase as many hoses as you need.

Step2

Unwrap your hose(s) and lay them straight, preferably in the sun, to keep them from tangling. This makes it easier to place them later.

Step3

To conserve additional water, connect a regular garden hose from a faucet to the beginning of the garden bed where you will place the soaker hose(s), and then connect the regular hose to the beginning of the soaker hose.

Step4

If you already have plants in an area, be careful not to damage them when placing the soaker hose(s). Snake the hose(s) through your garden bed, making certain that important plants are very close to the hose. You can make a loop around the trunk of larger plants such as trees to give them even more water.

Step5

Using rocks or earth staples, secure parts of the soaker hose(s) that pop up.

Step6

Connect up to three soaker hoses together to cover larger areas.

Step7

When the weather is dry, run your soaker system(s) every other day for about an hour at a time. Don’t turn the faucet on too far or you will waste water: all that’s needed is a slow drip from the hose.

Tips & Warnings

You might buy a timer so you never have to remember to turn on the faucet. But don’t forget to turn off your timer when it has rained a lot because too much water is one of the main causes of plant death and can be just as bad for a plant as not enough water.
If you want to customize your soaker hose system, buy some hose repair pieces at your garden center. Then cut the soaker hose, insert a plastic mender piece and to the other end of the mender connect a piece of regular garden hose. This is useful if you need to string your soaker hose across a path: the water flows through the regular hose and doesn’t get wasted on the path. This method also works well if you don’t need the entire length of a soaker hose. Just be sure to close up the end of the line with an end cap that comes with each soaker hose you buy.
If you have only one water faucet in your yard, you can buy plastic or metal “Y” connectors to automatically turn your faucet into two faucets, each of which can have a separate hose attached to it. Simple switches turn each side off and on. You can get fancy with these and add more than one connector to your faucet if you like.
Hoses can pop up and not lie flat on the ground when you first lay them down. “Earth staples” are a good solution to this problem. They are long, U-shaped metal stakes that you insert into the ground at intervals to secure your hoses, wherever they’re needed. Earth staples are available at garden stores.
If you connect more than about three 50-foot soaker hoses together, especially if they run uphill, the amount of water pressure at the end of the chain of hoses might be very low and might result in the plants around the hose not getting enough water.