We live in sunny Southern California. And while it is amazing to have 300+ days of sunshine per year it comes at a cost. Namely, we live in a coastal desert and have water restrictions.
Thankfully, we are able to have a vibrant garden by using some smart water techniques.
Where we are
Back in January, when we first planted our garden, we bought a basic drip irrigation kit from Drip Depot. This kit came with everything we needed to get started. We had enough of the big tubing to run from our water spikket all the way around our yard. It also included enough of the smaller tubing and fittings to run water directly to every plant.
This was great at first. But as the occasional showers of February – April came to a screeching halt and things dried up, we quickly found out that we weren’t able to distribute water like we needed to. Some plants were drowning while others were drying out. This was especially evident in our herb area. Everything was dying.
So with each water cycle I kept an eye on what needed less water and what needed more water. I swapped out dripper and finally found a match for each plant to thrive.
My next challenge was determining how often to water. I wanted an easy answer that I could program into my life. For some reason 12 minutes has become the magic number. And, in general, I lay down 12 minutes of water every other day. But I also adapt this to the weather conditions. A little hotter, I’ll wait 1.5 days between waterings. A little cooler or especially humid, I’ll go 2.5 days.
Next steps
Expansion: We have two more garden areas we’d like to expand to. If we’re able to do those expansions, one I will be able to add onto our existing system while the other is further away and I’d want to larger crops, so it’ll require its own irrigation system. Our neighbor also waters our fruit trees and I’d like to expand our system to be able to do that easier, as well.
Timers: Our summer vacations revealed a new problem for this new gardening family. I drove 40 minutes each way every other day to water the garden. That hardly seemed “green” to me. So I’m looking at adding some timers to the system to help.
Rain barrels: We don’t get a lot of rain in San Diego. But when we have our rainy season it’d be awesome to capture some for hand watering over the summer.
Experiments: We have a few areas of our property that are difficult to get water to. I’d like to try a few ollas there to see how that would work. I have a feeling that it would work especially well for some types of vegetables and not so well for others. But, since we’d be expanding into areas not currently gardened, any yield would be awesome.
