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@Lilysmom1 wrote:@gardenman , looking good! Love the pretty boxes. Your home will be postcard pretty with full blooms.
I want you to come and do an irrigation system for me...on two acres☺️. S
Two acres is a lot to irrigate. You do have an advantage though living on a lake. It's kind of like a giant, natural rain barrel full of water you can use (well, might be able to use depending on local regulations) to irrigate your plants. Many farmers create irrigation ponds to water their fields and a lake is pretty much a natural irrigation pond if the local authorities allow you to use the water.
Drip irrigation (what I use on my railing planters, hanging baskets, and assorted plants on the porch) is pretty easy to set up. I have my feed line coming up on one side of the porch to the level of the railing, then I put a tee-fitting in to split it in half. One half goes up to the ceiling level and runs around the porch to water the hanging baskets, while the other half runs around on the inside of the porch railing to water the railing planters and plants on the porch floor. Both lines then meet up on the far side of the porch forming a giant loop of water that keeps everything more or less equally pressurized. Here's a photo of how that looks from the inside of the porch. The tubing will eventually get painted white the next time I paint the porch to help it all disappear. On the right of the photo you can see a line going up a post. That's the doorway of the porch. The lower loop goes up and then down on the other side back to railing height and around that side of the porch until it meets up with the upper loop at the opposite corner of the porch.
The big boxes on either side of the porch take advantage of the flood table type technology. Flood tables are neat in that the plants are held in a table with a raised border and when the plants need watering a pump simply fills the table with water and the plants sit there in it, getting watered from the bottom until they're satisfied and then the water gets drained and stored for reuse. I first saw that used thirty or forty years ago when my mother and I went to a specialty African Violet grower. (Tinari Greenhouses.) African Violets don't like water on their foliage and a flood table is an ideal way to water them. Watering can be completely automated using flood tables so it's a very cost-effective way to water lots of plants.
My two big boxes are simply flood tables built into a long planter box. They have a low end by the pump and a high end on the opposite side. At eight every morning during the growing season the pump comes on and pumps water up from the two connected 110-gallon stock tanks into the low side of the boxes. The boxes slowly fill until the far side, the high side gets about an inch deep, then the water overflows back into the stock tank on that side. The plants in those boxes are all in four-inch pots and sitting atop homemade capillary matting. (Sheets of craft felt covered with a thin layer of quilt batting.) At 8:30 AM the pump shuts off and the water drains back out through the pump line draining the boxes and the water goes back into the stock tanks to be reused the next day.
A big advantage of reusing the water is most of the fertilizer used in modern potting mixes is water-soluble. When watered traditionally, much of that fertilizer just gets washed away. With this method, the fertilizer stays in the water that then gets reused so the fertilizer stays available to the plants and doesn't just get washed away and lost.
With this system, I'm pretty much reduced to just being an observer. The drip emitters can get a bit quirky from time to time so I tend to go out around eight in the morning when everything starts up to water the plants that aren't watered automatically and check to be sure the emitters are working okay. It's a good system though and handy for me as if I end up in the hospital again anytime during the summer, it'll take care of itself and water the plants until I get back home. I like to overwater each hanging basket each morning so water is dripping from each basket and they're saturated. It takes about twenty minutes for the drip emitters to get that done. In the really hot days of summer when the baskets are fully mature and need more water, I'll often go out later in the day and manually run the drip system for ten minutes or so. The timer I use for it has a manual override which is handy. It can also be set to water them twice a day, but only at a 12-hour interval which isn't ideal. The plants on hot days need more water around three or four and not eight at night. I may invest in a different timer later on that has more adjustability, but this works for now. They have some now that are Alexa enabled which is kind of neat. "Alexa, water the plants."
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