Beautify Your* Landscape AND Conserve* Water Drip by Drip!
Drip irrigation -- also known as low-volume or micro-irrigation -- is not currently restricted by the most cities' watering laws, so this technique allows you a way to efficiently irrigate landscape beds, gardens, and specimen plants. (With global warming well entrenched, water both precious and costly, it behooves us to order a bunch of these fittings, which even a ten year old could put together.) STUDY AT: http://www.irrigationtutorials.com/dripguide.htmhttp://www.dripirrigation.com/drip_irrigation.php?cPath=38
They components are easy to pick up and re-arrange so that really, in the case of a new planting, consider using micro-irrigation as a temporary, "nurse" system to establish new plantings. Pull them up when the perennials are well rooted, your artichokes, berries, your orchard...move em! RAINBIRD makes all the components so you want to see: http://www.rainbird.com/homeowner/index.htm
http://www.rainbird.com/homeowner/support/timers.htm
I happen to have a neighbor who's a professor at an Agricultural College of note, Pierce College, living a few streets down and I've seen the miracle of drip emitter systems. You're freed from pulling around a hose, getting drenched, sunburned and getting a huge water bill. If a City Employee passes, sees you watering between 9 am and 4 pm, you get a fat ticket, too. Nobody sees your drip emitters. They're quietly glugging glugging into each stand up pot or bed on a timer, nobody sees nuttin' ! So if you have to run to work early and leave the kids to water the gardens, they won't get tickets, either. But best is, let the timer do it. BJ is the professor's name. His class is 15$ in Pierce Extension. Give him a call 818 343-4141 and ask him what books to buy, what websites to study. In fact, sign up for the next semester. Email him at waterwise@dslextreme.com If you live in Los Angeles or better, the SAN FERNANDO VALLEY 22 miles north of LA, it's worth a little time to be studying with him. Or send your idiot nephew in to take the class, buy him an old truck and start WATERSAVER GARDENS INC. with your neph as an employee. Cuz water prices are doubling now, and tripling and quadrupling when GLOBAL WARMING gets hairy.
Traditional landscape sprayers and sprinklers throw water (in gallons per minute) into the air and onto plants where much is lost to evaporation. In contrast, micro-irrigation emitters apply water slowly -- in gallons per hour ---; close to the soil and roots of plants. This application efficiency can result in a 50 - 70% comparative saving in water.
Actually drip irrigation -- where water seeps from tubing or drip emitters -- is only one type of micro-irrigation. Other forms include bubblers, micro-sprinklers (which rotate), and micro-sprayers (which are stationary). Israeli agriculture developed this technology over 20 years ago and has used it to vastly stretch its limited water resources. Today, micro-irrigation can be found on farms throughout Florida and the U.S. and it’s now available, off-the-shelf, in most home and garden supply stores.
Micro-irrigation components or starter kits are inexpensive and easy to install. They connect to outside faucets or the end of a hose. Simply lay out the flexible tubing and use the punch tool (furnished in the kit) to install the drippers or micro-sprayers where you want them. Drip tubing also exists. Unlike traditional soaker hoses, this product has emitters within the tubing which apply the water uniformly along the entire length of the tubing. Existing in-ground, automatic irrigation systems can be retrofitted to use micro-irrigation as well. Shrub sprays can be replaced with micro-sprayers or the riser pipe can be outfitted with devices which allow drip tubing to be installed. Micro-irrigated zones can be wired into time clocks. Last there can be watering systems buried deep beneath a bed, (See drawing below.) A qualified irrigation contractor, is likely your best bet with such a project. The local civic water resources organization maintains a list of such qualified professionals.
FROM GEOFLOW CORPORATION.
Micro-irrigation isn’t the best choice for all situations. Consider these facts:
It is not appropriate for lawns. Yes, drip tubing could be laid beneath the grass, but the spacing of the tubes would need to be extremely close -- about 6-8 inches apart. In Florida’s sandy soil, water is pulled rapidly downward by gravity and little seepage occurs across the soil. Couple this problem with the limited root system of a lawngrass, and you can understand why micro-irrigation really isn’t feasible for this use.
Clogging may occur in certain conditions. The small holes in micro-irrigation systems are easily clogged. Municipal water and the small screen filters that come with most micro kits will keep the systems operational. However, water from wells, ponds or lakes must be filtered and chemically treated to remove debris and algae-forming bacteria.
The system must be carefully monitored. It’s easy to waste water with micro-irrigation systems if they are not frequently checked for leaks and damaged emitters. The tubing also needs to be flushed occasionally. Most importantly, remember to turn them off! Purchase a simple, inexpensive dial-timer which can be installed and operated at the faucet.
Micro-irrigation systems, whether they are hose-end, connected to a faucet, or operated through a controller, should be calibrated once they are installed. Note how long it takes your system to apply enough water to wet the root zone (about 1/2 " to 1" of water) and operate the system AS-NEEDED for this length of time. Micro-irrigation can help you have a quality landscape, a productive vegetable garden, or just a lovely little flower bed. Conservation is still key, so use these systems wisely and save water DRIP by DRIP.
Have a son or nephew who has no career plans? Take the lad aside, discuss Earth CHANGES which are happening. THE DROUGHT is in many countries now, not just CALIFORNIA. That's GLOBAL WARMING and how he could make a lot of money learning a very simple trade, DRIP EMITTER TECH. More things than just recession are coming. I refer to global warming, drought. GLOBAL WARMING means your garden will be a hot spot, we'll have a permanent heat wave. Air conditioning costs double down electricity. Water prices soar in times of Massive drought so there are ways to have it cool without AC. Have your big trees surrounding the entire house by then, cool by hosing the leaves all midday. If they still let us have water. Most economic cooling system is misters in the tree tops. Emitters of fine spray. Evaporation. Principle of refrigeration. EVERYONE should have misters by summer 2010. Palm Springs is a city that uses them on city streets. In Business district. Price on all this plastic tech will triple when the INFLATION HITS and the DROUGHT, so acquire your equipment now and send your nephew off to study drip emitter tech. My neighbor's class is so cheap, it's a few weeks and the kids up and running. Back him in a business, and rake in the money!
PS. TO GET YOUR START UP MONEY, Brown bag it for a year. You know what it means when you do that. When lunch out is l0$ and (in CONTRAST) homemade lunch brown bagging it is a solitary buck, and you can save 9$ a day, 54$ a week, 216 a month, $2592 a year on lunches, that's exclusive of coffee, another $1095 extra...and total saved if you brown bag lunch and thermos up some coffee is $3687 anually and if you could invest that sum annually in your drip nephew getting a truck, a load of drip emitter pipe, and DRIPSCAPING posh gardens and making l00k a year, MINIMUM... your business, not his... he's just your employee... you could be a millionaire inside of a year. Off BROWN BAGGING IT!
LUCRATIVE INVENTION FOR YOU TO MARKET! This does not exist. You'll be the first. You can take to HOME DEPOT or put it for sale online, via mail order. A TUB TO ROSE BED SYPHON! For your bath water to go from bath TUB-2-GARDEN, soap bubbles and all. Imagine this: a family of 5 uses thousands of gallons of bath/ shower water a month, hugely costly. Why not get double use? Seems to me that brings down the cost of H20 by half, saves the clouds from having to manufacture more rain water and snow. My tub is near a window, I'll bet yours is too, if we PLUG TUB well, even during showers, and if we use a simple old throwaway GARDEN hose, we can create a SUCTION and get the water to go out the window into garden bed so we don't ever have to water that side of the house! We save money coming and going! SAVE h20 TOO!
We all need a little window just at the height of where tub and tile meet --with direct access to the outdoors for that hose to thread through. Place tip far from hose or near. Doesn't matter. The kit, the HOSE, the weight to keep one end under water, and the MOUTHPIECE which has to adjust to fit over various faucets, (as that is how the suction is built up, you fill the hose with water before you dunk it into the tub and weigh it down and start draining.) This seems to me to be a four part piece of MERCHANDISE so that's why I think you could make money selling it. Call it "TUB TO ROSE BUSH?" Hose can be an old one the homeowner already has, so your fittings should meld with current commercially available home-watering hoses.
Then make GARDEN SCULPTURE "RAIN CATCHERS". A thousand each, minimum. Go into production on them, mail order them. Travel to install, etc.
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Our POSTER is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Futurist and Astrologer. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! FRUGAL LIFE STYLE TIPS, HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also ARTISANRY FOR EXPORT, EARN EUROS....* Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 15$ natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic! No smarter, more accurate career reading out there!
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