Watering Your Vegetable Garden with Drip Tape

Drip Tape Irrigation System

Overhead watering can be a pain. You have to move the sprinkler around the garden every few hours and you always end up watering areas outside the garden that don't need watering. If the wind is blowing, you can forget a consistent watering pattern. Stop wasting water. Water your garden more effectively, consistently and conservatively with drip tape irrigation. Drip tape functions similar to a soaker hose, but much more reliably. Unlike a soaker hose that inconsistently emits water along the length of the hose, drip tape has emitters with specific spacing along the length of the tape. Our drip tape has emitters with a 12" interval spacing, which works great for both transplants and direct-seeded crops. For transplanted crops like tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, you can use the emitter spacing to help determine where to place your transplants. For example, if you plant your tomatoes on 2' spacing, you would just plant a tomato transplant on top of every other emitter.  Drip tape is also more durable and doesn't clog over time like a soaker hose tends to do.

15 mil Drip Tape Irrigation Kit

We recommend burying drip irrigation tape under the soil and planting directly on top of it. Burying the tape makes it easier to lay because the soil provides a downward weight on the tape, preventing it from twisting or moving as it would if it were on top of the soil. Burying also prevents rodents from chewing into the tape and creating leaks. And finally, burying the tape makes it easier to weed around your plants when they emerge because the tape is located directly under your plants. Our drip irrigation tape can be buried up to 6" deep under the soil. Our drip tape is available in two different thicknesses, 8 mil and 15 mil. The 8 mil tape has a lifespan of one year or two growing seasons (spring and fall). This is ideal for annual plants in a vegetable garden where the crop rotation and plant spacing will change from one season to the next. The 15 mil tape has a lifespan of 5 years, which works great for perennials such as asparagus, blueberries, blackberries, etc. Both our 8 mil and 15 mil drip tape are available in convenient kits which include all the necessary components to establish a drip irrigation system. These kits include the necessary filter, pressure regulator, mainline tubing and enough fittings for 20 rows.