Sprinkler systems

[Grafting Ken]

Hi all I’ve seen posts before about people looking for sprinkler irrigation systems.

I’m just trying out a product from Netafim called gyro net, they also do a super net. Lots of different flow rates available and the sprinkler pops up and closes to keep insects out.

These sprinklers are fantastic and very well made and come at a great price.. Well worth a try.

[metisdead]

A post with flaming comments toward forum members has been removed.

[Encid]

On 6/3/2023 at 10:22 AM, Grafting Ken said:

Hi all I’ve seen posts before about people looking for sprinkler irrigation systems.

I have used Netafim 8mm micro drip line systems and they do a great job around our fruit trees. 
 

The dripline goes around the trees so gives a really good deep watering way better than any sprinkler IMO because they do clog up.

 

However I'm willing to give these a try... thanks!

[drtreelove]

This is an interesting development, thanks for sharing.

 

As a tree care professional, that's what I do almost every, is get called to diagnose tree problems and make recommendations. In the top two of problematic issues that I see is water managment, too much or too little.  Drip emitters, drip lines and sprinkers all have their strengths and weaknesses, and water efficiency usually comes down to how they are set up for thorough coverage, frequency and amount of water being put out.  

 

Thorough coverage of the soil surface and depth of water infiltration into the soil profile throughout the absorbing root zone is a key to good management. Drip emitters just can't get that kind of coverage. Emitters water spots and not the full soil surface, so this highly unnatural method of watering may keep plants alive, but by missing so much of the natural fertility resources that exist in the full soil volume, the plants cannot thrive.  I often see drip emitters placed too close to the tree trunks and left in those placements for the long term, where they create over-wet conditions and crown rot. 

 

Netafim-type drip lines and soaker hoses are better, depending on how many lines are installed, the placement and spacing, and how much water volume is applied and at what frequency.  Usually this is shortcut to a single line and minimal volume, and therefore this setup still only delivers to a limited amount of root zone with shallow watering. Sprinklers have some  disadvantages, but overall I see much better coveage and tree health promotion possibilities this way, depending on setup, programming, with frequent monitoring and management. 

 

Besides delivering water to the existing root zone, irrigation should be set up to cover a little beyond the existing root zone, in order to encourage root growth to the largest area possible. Facilitating an expansive absorbing root zone  means more soil moisture and fertility resources for the tree. Frequent shallow watering promotes shallow rooting and reduced drought tolerance, so deep watering should be preferred

 

Mulching and/or cover cropping aid soil microbiome management, soil aggregate structure building and will increase fertility, soil moisture retention and drought tolerance.

 

I'm tree and landscape, home orchard and home veggie garden oriented.  Commercial growers have their own considerations. 

 

Container plantings are a little different for water managment strategy and sprinklers usually don't fit in that model. Compatible plantings and species-specific irrigation requirements should always be considered. 

 

https://www.fertileearthlandcare.com/watering-trees/

 

[drtreelove]

I ran this by my friend who is a landscape irrigation specialist in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo horticulture degree and over 20 years experience. Here are some of his comments.

 

I've known of these for some time.   They come in many different flow rates and would allow really good fine tuning of a system. 

They would be a great system if they were gardener proof. 

The downside is they would be foreign to other professionals so I've had challenges where I've put in a nice system and then somebody else comes along and bad-mouths my system and then the homeowner gets confused and doesn't know who to believe. 

A few times I've had my systems replaced because it was new and unfamiliar. And the gardener talked trash about it and put in a traditional system.

 

And more from our discussion about irrigation if anyone is interested: 

 

It is unreasonable to expect a homeowner to become a proficient irrigator.

Concept of "adequate soil moisture" seems impossible for most homeowners to comprehend.

I have tried numerous analogies that they may relate to such as "you want your soil to feel like moist cake, not cake batter" 

But that means they still got to get their hands in the soil.   And that means they've got to do some "work" before they set their next irrigation cycle.

The idea of irrigating to "field capacity", and then letting the soil moisture level fall safely close to "permanent wilting point" is not something most homeowners want to consider understanding.

And so we have the conundrum that it's really not application method it is irrigation programming that plays the biggest part in plant problems.

 

I'm seeing people in this cold Spring already irrigating their lawn 3 days a week for 15 minutes.  Watching that water run off the lawn into the shrub bed that's now all mud, and knowing that that shrub bed is getting irrigated 3 days a week for 15 minutes as well.

The average homeowner has a kindergartner's understanding of irrigation, infiltration, percolation and evapotranspiration.

 

An interesting fact I learned through regenerative ag study:

 

Evapotranspiration is nonsensical in a good regenerative system. You don't have any significant evaporation in a good regenerative system.   You just have transpiration as your primary loss of soil moisture. 

Cover crop, crop residue, or mulch will do such a tremendously good job of cooling the soil that evaporation is cut to near insignificant level.

Evapotranspiration assumes that you're going to have big expanses of bare, hot soil between your plants. 

Evapotranspiration goes along with dead soil devoid of a living microbial community, which now we agree is just dirt-hydroponic.

 

Primarily, overhead irrigation is considered inefficient because application rate exceeds infiltration rate and therefore you have runoff.

Additionally overhead irrigation is considered inefficient when you have small droplet evaporation, and wind drift.

Any wind drift skews distribution uniformity and so you end up with excessively wet spot downwind excessively dry spot upwind.

Irrigation with overhead systems in the wind is totally insane.   And the finer the droplet size the more drift.

Which is part of the reason that big lawns use stream rotors.   Huge droplets tend to resist drifting far in the wind.

 

Companies like Netafim have design manuals that can show how to calculate precipitation rate with drip.

Most people don't lay out a drip system in a way that would provide uniform "precipitation".  As you know, two drip emitters at the root crown is total BS.

 

We have to lay out our drip system over the root zone similar to netafim in concentric rings. And then netifim provides all the charts necessary to calculate precipitation rate so that you know that your tree got a very specific amount of water.

 

It's all in the tables. It just requires a human to lay out the netafim on uniform spacing (12 in. space grid if the emitters are 12 in on center. Netifim also sells 18 in spacing and a couple other variations)

 

So if the system is built correctly and we know the flow rate and we know the spacing we can calculate the precipitation rate. And still we may have runoff because many soils are so <deleted>ty that even 0.5 gallons per hour runs off!!

 

But if we're doing it right, then we have addressed the crust and compaction and we should have infiltration adequate to keep up with 0.5 gallons per hour.

 

The guess and check model is: irrigate the system for 3 to 5 hours, and then monitor weekly until soil moisture in the top foot (or so) drops to a level that is "dry" enough to irrigate again.

 

Then set up your irrigation system with a weather sensing timer and tell it to adjust up or down based on CIMIS data that it gets through the pager network every day.

 

In fact many of these smart irrigation timers are smart enough to keep most homeowners out of trouble once they get set up correctly. My gut tells me they are 70% more effective than the homeowner and maybe only 20% more effective than a smart horticulture expert who knows irrigation.

 

The one thing they do is they provide consistency over great periods of time. So that a human doesn't have to run around and soil probe every property and play with the clock and adjust for every heat wave and cold spell.