In May, my husband and I decided to rip out half of our water-guzzling backyard lawn and replace it with a large entertainment deck and some raised vegetable beds. What a huge project this all turned out to be, especially as we did most all of it ourselves!
What I hadn’t anticipated was how difficult it would be to retro-fit my standard spray sprinklers into a drip system. What I learned is that drip systems operate on a much lower water pressure than a spray system for lawns and shrubs. The pressure is generally adjusted at the actual valve for that particular station. Here is the problem that I faced: Because of the lay-out of our existing sprinkler system, I needed to have lawn sprinklers on the same line as my new drip system so I couldn’t turn down the pressure at the valve, and I couldn’t afford to rip-out the entire system for the whole yard and isolate the drip lines to one valve.
So I started researching possible solutions and initially, I thought I had found a fix. Rainbird, and a couple other companies make a pressure reducer that you simply screw on the top of your riser and then attach your drip head. However, if you want to attach a head with more than one port to allow you to put drip lines to more than one plant, the pressure is reduced too much and you don’t get enough flow to actually water your plants.
I was so frustrated! But after spending way too much time experimenting and trying to make this work I finally found the solution at Home Depot. Orbit makes 4 and 8 port drip heads that simply screw onto your riser and allow you to adjust the flow right on the head. Genius! The 4-port head has a single control for all 4 ports, and the 8 port head allows you to control the flow for each individual line, which is perfect for my raised garden beds. Also, unlike similar products, these heads have little screw-on caps on the ports so that you can close one or more. So basically, using these heads, you can instantly turn any sprinkler riser into a drip delivery versus spray
And yes! The sides on the raised vegetable beds fold down for easy access but still keep out the bunnies.
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