Shrubblers

I have a new skill to add to my resume: irrigation specialist. I have been on my hands and knees installing a watering system called Shrubblers in all my gardens. It's long lengths of 1/2 inch garden hose, with little 1/4 inch side lines and emitters that you can attach to the main hose and place about the garden. It's a system.

It all sounds so easy to install and it is, but not if you are an elderly lady with little grasp of water pressure dynamics. The parts are fiddly -- the tiny emitter caps blow off if you open them too much and shoot geysers at your glasses. The thin 1/4 inch side tubing won't stay attached, and the work is all hands-and-knees, up and down, back and forth and then back to the faucet again.

And every line needs multiple connectors that mystify -- splitters and backflow thingies and elbows and tees and odd clamps and male and female connections that never match up.

Many homes here have automatic drip irrigation professionally installed underground. We don't. And putting in a real drip system now, with all the stonework patios and concrete walks and porch floors that surround our house, isn't feasible. So Shrubblers, self-installed and lying on top of the soil (but hidden a bit with some mulch) is my solution.

No one -- not a single home here -- has a lawn, but drip lines go to shrubs and raised beds around homes. It's the only way to automatically water anything in a climate where sprinkler spray evaporates before it hits the ground. Drip is efficient.

I've been hand watering all the new transplants in my gardens daily🌱see post script (older mature things can go much longer, but I'm not there yet). I stand over each plant, directing the hose where the water is needed, and soaking the soil deep deep down. Hand watering is efficient but it's labor intensive and takes a long time. I want a break. And I want to be able to go away at some point and not worry about parched plants while I'm gone.

I tried laying soaker hoses about, but they are really only for rows that want uniform soaking, not irregular gardens with odd shapes in multiple corners of the yard and with dry lovers planted next to water hoggers. Shrubblers gives me flexibility to water just what I want and where I want it, placing the emitters wherever needed. 

I'll still hand water a lot, especially the newest things, but this system gives me a break when I don't want to stand there with the hose, and it will allow me to go away for a week or more some day.

So I'm slowly figuring out how to weave these things in complicated arrangements around all my gardens from only two outdoor faucet sources, and how to regulate them. My legs are sore from all the up and down activity, but I'm learning irrigation basics.

Now, how to figure out those confusing timers . . .

🌱

I know, standard advice is not to water daily, you need to water occasionally and deeply to establish deeper roots. But when day after day the humidity is around 8% (it's 7% as I write this), all the water in the soil simply comes up through the plant and is transpired out through the leaves within hours.

Lack of rainfall is not the southwest gardener's bane, it's searingly dry air.