How to Water Vegetables With a Soaker Hose

To cut down on your water bill and the amount of water you have to use on your garden, a soaker hose delivers water to the soil without throwing it in the air and onto leaves. A soaker hose is often made from recycled materials and has small holes that seep droplets when low pressure water is run through the hose. When you want to water vegetables with a soaker hose, you can rest your hose on the surface of the garden or allow your hose to lay just under a layer of mulch or straw.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Soaker hose
• Standard hose
• U-shaped landscaping pins
• Backflow preventer, if needed
• Filter, optional
• Mulch, optional

1. Unroll a new soaker hose and stretch it out in the sun for an hour. As the hose begins to uncoil, continue to pull it straight and allow the sun to help relax the coil.

2. Attach your soaker hose to your outdoor faucet. If there is a distance between where your garden begins and the location of your faucet, use a standard hose between the two to cover the gap.

3. Prepare a flat garden bed before you begin to lay your hose and make it as level as possible. Gravity will pull your water downhill even when it's in a hose and under low pressure, so the plants at the bottom of a slope will end up getting more water than those at the top.

4. Run your soaker hose in a zigzag pattern, back and forth from one end of your garden to the other. Give a distance of 12 inches between each successive run, using multiple hoses connected together if necessary to cover the size of your garden.

5. Use U-shaped landscaping pins to anchor your hose in place, if necessary. Be sure not to pierce the hose in the process.

6. Turn the hose on for three hours at a time, every four to five days over the course of the growing season. For sandy soils, run the hose for one to two hours every three days that you don't have rain, but in clay soils, which absorb slowly but hold water longer, let the hose run overnight and don't water again for a week.

7. Adjust the length of watering time for your climate by considering the needs of the specific plants you are growing to help determine if less or more water is needed. Crops such as corn require lots of water while other vegetables, like spinach or carrots, won't need as much.

8. Attach a backflow preventer between your faucet and soaker hose to cut down on debris potentially moving up the line and into your drinking water supply. Adding a filter can also keep particles from getting into the soaker hose and clogging it. Both can usually be purchased in the same store that carries soaker hose and other attachments for direct application irrigation.

9. Extend the life of your hose by lightly burying it two to four inches under the soil level or by adding mulch over top of the hose once it is in place. Burying the hose helps keep sun damage to a minimum and prevents animals from nibbling on it and causing holes. The latter is a common problem in hot, arid climates. Empty the hose and store it indoors over winter to keep it from freezing, which can lead to cracks.

Tips & Warnings

• If you don't have or can't find landscaping pins, you can set rocks or bricks on the portions which are more resistant to staying where you want them. After a few days in the sun, the hose should be relaxed enough to remove the weights.

References

• Easy Garden Projects to Make, Build, and Grow; Barbara Pleasant; 2006