DripWorks Demonstration Garden Update

Back in late January and early February, we published a 2-part blog about heirloom seeds and talked about what we planned to grown in our demonstration garden this year.

It is now June and the garden is both beautiful and productive. The very mild weather we've had this Spring has allowed us to plant veggies and harvest earlier than usual. The perennial beds that line the entrance to the DripWorks store are flowering profusely. Over the past month, our lunchroom has reaped the benefits (forgive the pun), supplied with an abundance of lettuces and radishes.

Our four perennial flower beds are being watered with a variety of drip irrigation products to give customers an idea of what they might do in their own gardens and landscapes. The longest of these beds, 4' x 12', uses Drip Tape with emitters spaced every 8". Another of the beds, this one 4' x 10', uses 1/2" Emitter Tubing that has been snaked through it. One of the adjacent 4' x 8' bed uses 1/4" Soaker Dripline and the other employs Mini-Jet Sprayers.

Our 10' long garlic bed has 4 lines of 1/4" Soaker Dripline, with emitters spaced every 6" to water about 75 heads of garlic planted between the emitters. As we are close to harvesting the garlic, we have recently turned the water off to this bed to intensify its flavor.

We have peppers, peas, and sunflowers planted in a 12' long bed using Emitter Tubing with 1 gallon per hour emitters spaced at 12" intervals. Pressure compensating, flexible, and durable, emitter tubing is often used around the root zone of orchard trees as well as for permanent landscape features. Emitter tubing is available with factory-inserted emitters spaced every 9", 12", 18", 24", or 36".

For the tomato plants and flowers in this two-tiered bed, we have installed Pinch Drip Emitters. This emitter is pressure compensating and has an extremely low profile that allows it to lay nearly flat on the mainline tubing, making it resistant to being accidentally dislodged or damaged by mowers and weed whackers.

In our octagonal garden bed we planted beans, radishes, sweet basil, and more tomatoes. The ever versatile Soaker Dripline, with emitters spaced every 12", does an excellent job here. Before planting, we let the water run for 10 minutes, making it incredibly easy to see exactly where to place our seeds. It's hard to believe these beans were only planted a month ago.

One of the smaller beds contains 2 varieties of squash, Delicata and Butternut, and 2 varieties of melons, Kijari and Noir de Carmes, all from the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company. This bed is fed by an EZ-FLO fertilizer injector to show how easy it is to fertilize while watering.

In another two-tiered bed, watered by Soaker Dripline, we planted Brandywine and Ace High tomatoes alongside lemon cucumbers and yellow crookneck squash and lined the perimeter with sweet yellow onions.

That's it for this update. We'll come back in a month or two and show you how much it's grown and what it's producing. We hope your gardens are doing as well. If not, give us call.