The key with any automatic system is to have a person who's responsible for checking the system every day, especially if wasting water is a concern.
So for gardens with paid staff or where someone is "in charge" every day, drip can work. But for gardens where people install drip and then rarely visit, and no one is the designated responsible person who checks on the garden every day, more water is wasted with drip. A broken system running 24 hours or more wastes a lot of water!! At one garden, we've had exorbitant water bills at times, which afaik has always been from unattended hoses or broken automatic systems. One week last summer, every time I stopped at that garden, I heard water running and no one else was there: A hose that was supposed to have an automatic shutoff, a hose-end sprayer that had not been turned off all the way (nice crop of weeds under it, so it looked like a regular occurrence), a drip system that was running at 10 am and still running at 6pm, a drip system that was spurting water onto the path from the hose bib, etc. On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 12:07 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Down here in Baja, water is gold. The evaporation rate from hand watering > has us going to drip irrigation in the gardens in the orphanages where we > are working. Up to 70% of water is lost in a rainbird style irrigation > from evaporation. Hand watering would be less, of course, but dripping > onto the ground is still preferred. We just received 10,000 feet of drip > tape for less than $200. Yes, there is some up front cost, but for our > purposes in the gardens and orchards we're working in, drip does win. > > Happy Hoeing, > Jon > > Jon Stevens, Executive Director > Growing Gardens For Life > 269 Russell Road > Camano Island, WA 98282-8512 > www.growinggardensforlife.org > [email protected] > 1-360-387-4449 > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20140115/bfdc7c9c/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
