Many ways to skin a cat

This time of year I get many inquiries from homeowners concerned about their shrubs and tees.  With the onset of high temperatures some of the plants on or around their property begin to wilt and die.

Meeting with the homeowner and diagnosing watering deficiencies is the start of the discovery process. A common themes that surfaces is that shrubs and trees planted and irrigated with the same drip line have wildly different watering requirements.  Almost without exception what was planted x-number of years ago has now begun to out-grow the original water source.

The diagnosis (and accompanying bid amount) to correct the problem is not as simple as one would think.   Just upping the watering cycle duration may help the homeower in some cases.  But increasing watering duration to save one type of plant or tree can easily cause other more drought tolerant plants to drown. 

The cliche goes that there are many ways to skin a cat (with apologies to our feline friends) and while I have never personally attempted any method of cat skinning, I have likewise seen different methodologies when it comes to plants and drip irrigation.

 A contractor friend of mine who does primarily sprinkler system installation likes to put the drip emitter directly into the 5/8" drip tube, run the 1/4" emitter tubing (sometimes called "spaghetti line") to the base of the plant and call it good. Doing it that way I estimate he saves some goodly number of hours per year and maybe 10 cents per plant installed over the method that I will describe below.

Nurseries, landscapers and plant cultivators refer to plant material size by the gallon.  For example, a one gallon plant is about 6 to 8 inches tall and a 5 gallon plant is typically 15 to 18 inches tall.  In as little as one year, plants may outgrow the original water source, i.e., and the 1 gallon-per-hour (gph) emitter that worked just fine last year no longer provides adequate water flow for this year's (now) larger sized plant.

When that happens, the only solution is to bring more water to the plant.  Additional drip lines may be run to the plant or a new emitter allowing a greater gph flow to the plant must be installed or the plant will struggle and slowly die.  In order to do accomplish getting more water to the plant, one must remove the decorative gravel, get under the weed-guard fabric, and dig back to the 5/8" drip tube to make the change.  That about doubles the required labor quotient compared to if  the drip line had been installed the correct way.

What is the correct way? In my opinion, the correct way to run drip irrigation is to install a barbed connector at the drip tube, connect the spaghetti line to the connector, run the 1/4" tubing to the plant and connect the color-coded drip emitter at the plant-end of the line. Then, when plants begin to outgrow their water-source, a maintenance guy like myself can easily snip off the old emitter and install a new, higher gph emitter. The labor requirement is short and material cost is negligible.

So on behalf of landscape maintenance guys, I hope we can influence irrigation system installers everywhere to take the extra time at installation to use the 10 cent connector.  Not likely.  For now, we will just keep muddling through, dealing with the short-cuts of others.  

As the Preacher said:   The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.  (Ecclesiastes 1:9)


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