Every year seems to be getting dryer and dryer. Watering the vegetable garden has always been a chore I have not enjoyed as I never seem to have enough time. This means my plants don’t get watered when they should or as often as they should. So this year I decided we would install a drip irrigation sytem in the vegetable garden.

I have used a small do-it-yourself drip irrigation system for my planters for the past three years and it works wonderfully saving both time and water. So I thought why not try this same approach for the vegetable garden? So today we installed our system complete with soaker hoses to every plant row.

For my planters, my watering system is set up on a timer that comes on twice a day (once a day in the fall when the weather cools) but for the vegetable garden I will take a different approach. Instead I will use one of those times that you turn on the tap and set how many minutes you would like it to continue to run for — say 10 or 15 minutes. This way if it rains I won’t automatically be watering the vegetable garden. (You should always water your planters even after a rain since the rainwater seldom gets to the soil under the foliage in a planter).