Drip Irrigation Systems

Drip Irrigation Systems for Modern Watering 

Drip irrigation systems offer a beautifully simple alternative to  traditional methods of garden watering. Traditional garden watering  methods are notoriously wasteful, shedding far more water into useless  puddles than actually gets anywhere near the plants it is supposed to be  feeding. Using the modern technology made available by the drip  irrigation technique, a gardener can save him or her self time and money  - while doing his or her bit for the planet, too.

So what are drip irrigation systems? Well, simply put, they are  arrangements of thin tubes that carry single droplets of water right to  the roots of the plants that need feeding. So far, so good - but how  does a single drop of water do as much work as the four gallons  previously dispensed through hose pipes and watering cans?

Simple. Hosepipes and watering cans might well dispense four gallons of  water in a single session - but only a few drops from those gallons ever  do any plant feeding. Think about rain for a moment - and the ways in  which plants collect rainwater. Rain falls everywhere, when the heavens  open - covering an area of the world in hundreds and hundreds of gallons  of water. Yet the plants that live under it - the ones we are now  feeding with drip irrigation systems - have had to evolve hideously  complicated techniques for catching just those few precious drops that  actually make the difference. Anyone who has ever seen slow motion  footage of plant collecting water can attest to this. The plant funnels a  couple of lucky drops of rain into its catchment area, usually with its  leaves. The water then runs down a stalk and into the ground, where it  is sucked up by the root system.

Drip irrigation systems do exactly the same thing without all the  tedious messing around that plants have to go through. Those precious  few drops of water are delivered - from a normal garden tap, connected  to this array of small tubes - directly to the roots. The plant grows.  In the space of a year, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water can be  saved. Certainly way more than by imposing hosepipe bans, or trying to  watch one's water consumption. This is super high tech plant feeding -  garden watering for the 21st century.

Drip irrigation systems aren't expensive, at all, and can be fitted by  anyone. They run off of a normal garden tap and can be as simple to  control as turning that tap on. It's also possible to purchase control  panels for them - which means multiple watering programs can be  automated. That, in turn, means that the drip irrigated garden can have  specially directed amounts of water (the correct amount of water for  each, at the right frequency) delivered to different areas, with no  effort and no waste.

That's the kind of gardening that makes perfect sense, in a  resource-poor world constantly worried about its impact on the  environment. And for very little outlay, the technology can belong to  any gardener, amateur or no. It's time to change the way watering  happens - and drip irrigation systems are definitely the way to do it.