Our half-acre lot in the ’burbs is
shaded by nine mature silver maples. The only spot that gets decent sun is
the gravel drive that runs to our pole barn. Even an inexperienced
gardener like me suspected veggies might have a tough time growing in
gravel, so I built three 4x8 raised beds. I decided to water the beds by
draping them with a soaker hose, but the hose wound among the beds in a
serpentine trail that left me high-stepping through the garden like a
middle-aged drum major.
Figuring there had to be a better
way to water a garden than tossing hose like spaghetti, I came up with my
$8.16 (sales tax not included) irrigation system. I combined soaker hose,
½-inch PVC pipe, and connectors to make an irrigator that works in either
raised or standard gardens. It’s a cinch to put the feeder pipes under
ground (or gravel, in our case), which keeps everything tidy and impresses
the daylights out of visitors.
What’s more, these plans can be
adapted for additional beds or extended to fit a standard garden. After I
show you how to build an irrigator for one bed or two standard garden
rows, I’ll explain how to slap on more modules.
Parts
Go to a home center or hardware
store and get a length of half-inch PVC pipe. (The standard length is ten
feet.) While you’re there, grab a tee connector, three 90°
elbow connectors, one 90º street elbow (threaded on one end) two ½-inch
threaded male adapters (“red” may appear in the part description), two
hose end caps, and a brass ¾-inch hose connector. You’ll also need small
cans of primer cleaner and PVC cement. A parts list appears at the end of
this article, but here’s what they look like:
It makes sense in a 48-inch wide
raised bed to run two sections of soaker hose with equal space between
each hose and the walls of the bed – in other words, 16 inches apart. (If
you’re building this for a garden, adjust the distance to fit your rows.)
Cut the PVC pipe so that you have four pieces that are each 2½ inches long
and two pieces that are each seven inches long.
Assembly – The Front End
I designed my irrigator to go
through the end of the raised bed. That meant I couldn’t glue up the
parts of the irrigator until I ran the pipe through the hole I bored in
the wall of the raised bed. In case you want to do the same thing, we’ll
assemble the irrigator in two sections – the front end and the back end. Let’s first tackle the front end, the part that connects up to the soaker
hose that will water your garden.
1. Using the swab that came with
the can of PVC primer, swab the outside ends of each piece of pipe
and the inside ends of each connector. The primer cleans off dirt
and film left on the pipe during manufacture that might keep the cement
from doing its job.
2. Swab the inside of one end of
the tee connector with the PVC cement. Then, swab the outside of a 7-inch
piece of pipe with cement. Stick the pipe into the connector, give it a
twist, and hold it for a few seconds. The cement I use recommends holding
the parts in place for 30 seconds to prevent pipe push-out, but I found
ten seconds long enough for a solid hold. Repeat the process on the other
end of the tee connector with the other 7-inch pipe.
3. Glue a 90º elbow connector
(the kind without threads) to the other end of each 7-inch pipe. Make
sure the elbow is on the same plane as the tee connector. Otherwise,
you’ll have some pretty funky angles for attaching hose.
4. Glue a 2½-inch piece of pipe to
each elbow connector. To each of those pieces of pipe, glue a threaded
male adapter, to which you’ll later screw a length of soaker hose.
