The BEST Irrigation System for Raised Bed Gardens)

When it comes to taking care of the garden, the hardest thing to manage is watering. How much should you water? How often should you water? It rained yesterday, should you water today? And how do you set up your water system in the first place? Well, I've tried all different kinds of watering, from watering by hand with a watering can, using a hose and a spray head, having a full formal irrigation system that's connected to the rest of my yard. But over the years, I figured out a system that I've taught to thousands of new gardeners. It is an easy irrigation system that connects right up to the hose faucet on your home. So today I wanna teach you the eight steps to set up your own watering system for your garden. We're gonna walk through the supplies that you need and each and every one of the eight steps. And I'll be showing you the exact same watering system that we use for this garden, which obviously is doing pretty good. So no more stressing about the water. I'm gonna teach you a system that'll keep your garden watered so that you never have to worry about that chore again. So I'm pulling these instructions from our Easy Garden Kit. Our Easy Garden Kit is packed with 10 different seeds that grow the easiest plants available in the garden. You get it with a video school that shows you how to grow each and every seed, plus recipes, planting plans, and this incredible Easy Garden Setup Guide. So this guide shows you how to set up your raised bed, but it also shows you how to set up a water system. So we're gonna be following this part of the guide in this video. You can grab the Easy Garden Kit right below this video after we're done. So the magic first happens with this timer. This timer is gonna directly connect to your hose faucet. Now you can tee off your hose if you wanna still use the hose for other purposes besides your garden, and then just use the line with the other tee to connect your timer. Then you're gonna need a pressure regulator that's gonna connect to your hose that will run to the garden. More on that in a second. Be sure you've also got some plumber's tape to make sure all the connections are nice and tight. Then you're gonna need a little bit of tubing to connect your irrigation kit to this timer. You wanna have some bendable tubing so that you can work your way toward the garden space. And then you're gonna also wanna have some hard tubing like this that'll bring the irrigation system up into your garden. Next, you're gonna need two kinds of connectors. You're gonna need this tee connector to connect your tubing to your irrigation lines on the top of the soil. Then you're gonna need these elbow brackets to connect the corners of your tubing so that you don't miss any of the smaller spots in your garden. You're also gonna need some landscaping pins to hold down all your drip tubing to be sure it has good contact with your soil. And finally, you're just gonna buy some drip tubing. So this is tubing that's made to produce drip irrigation for a garden or a landscape. There's gonna be small holes inside the irrigation tubes that's gonna release water over a long period of time so that the roots in your plants get lots of water, but the water isn't wasted in other places in the garden. So once you've got your supplies, it's time to get started. First, you're gonna connect your timer to your spigot. Again, you can use a tee to divide the spigot so you can use the hose for other purposes in your yard. And then you're gonna connect your timer, making sure it's really nice and tight. Also be sure that you've got batteries connected to your timer, and it's already set on the current time and date. So before you do anything else, you just wanna make sure that your timer is working. You want to test and try to manually get the water to run through your timer, through that little valve right there, and just do a couple of tests to be sure that everything's in good working condition before you start to connect all the other parts of the irrigation. Next, you wanna connect a pressure regulator to your timer. When you're using drip tubing, you're gonna have water that's gonna be just slowly emitting from the tubes, not like it comes out of typical irrigation systems where it's a big spray head. If you wanna think about a spray head that you typically see sprinkling the yard, that's releasing gallons per minute. But when you're using drip tubing, it's releasing gallons per hour. So we need the pressure regulator to divide the timer and the hose from the rest of the system so that it's not forcing loads and loads of water into the irrigation system that the drip tube simply cannot release fast enough. So you'll now attach the pressure regulator, use a little bit of tape to be sure that the connection is secure. Now it's time to connect your tubing to the pressure regulator. This is where you get to decide how you want to bring the water into the garden. You can dig a trench and hide the hose or the tubing underneath that trench. You can simply have the hose just lay right on top of the soil on its way to the garden. You can make this as fancy or as not fancy as you want. The main goal is using poly tubing to get the water from the spigot and the pressure regulator all the way to the garden space. Step number five is to bring your hose up into the garden bed. So if you don't have your raised bed set up yet, it's time to do it. Set up the raised bed, fill it up with soil, cover the hose or your tubing to be sure it doesn't get any soil in it and bring it up right to soil level. You're then gonna cut it off right at the top of the soil level. And then you're gonna tee it off with this T-bracket and prepare to arrange your drip tubing along the top of your raised bed. Step number six is to be sure that the entire surface of your garden soil is gonna be covered by your drip irrigation. I like to lay the tubing about six inches apart from one another. I don't generally like to do grids, although I have done it in some of my garden projects. Instead, I like to come off of the edge of the garden about four to six inches and then have new lines running every six inches. Also being sure that the entire perimeter of the garden bed has drip line about four to six inches to the inside of the bed. On every corner, you'll use this elbow bracket to be sure that the lines stay connected. And then at the very end of the line, you'll use something called a goof plug, which will ensure that water doesn't run out of the drip tubing and instead stays inside the drip tubing and slowly releases into the garden space. Now, before I get to step number seven, don't forget that you can get all this instruction plus how to make a raised bed, 10 seeds that are super easy to grow with this watering system, and so much more in the Easy Garden Kit. You can grab it right below this video. Step number seven is now to go back to your water timer and first run it manually. Press go and just watch to see how the water runs out of your drip tubing to be sure you're getting plenty of coverage and everything is working great. Then you wanna set your timer to run every day, every two days, every three days, depending on the weather, depending on how hot it is, and depending on your evaporation rate. I generally like to run my timer around five or 6 a.m. in the morning. That conserves the most amount of water and gives the plants the drinks that they need before the day starts to warm up. In the summer, I'll run the timers longer, and in the winter, I'll run them for just a few minutes. You wanna remember here that drip tubing is only running gallons per hour, not gallons per minute. So even if you run it for 30 to 45 minutes, you haven't been putting gallons of water into your garden because of that pressure regulator and the way the drip tubing works. Step number eight, set your alarm and wake up at the exact same time that you set your timer for. Go out and double check that everything in your garden system is running smoothly, that there's no leaks, that everything turned on on time, and your garden system is working. Once you've got this set up, you are now ready to take care of your garden without having to lift a finger. The one caveat I would add here is to watch the rain. You don't wanna water your garden unnecessarily. So if you have a period of heavy rains, if you have several days in a row where you're getting a good bit of rain, it's a good idea to go override your system and pause it for a couple days. Just be sure you turn it back on as soon as the rain stops. And that's all it takes to set up a watering system. See what I mean? Super easy. Talk about easy. I know how to make a raised bed for less than $100 in just one quick trip to the hardware store. Hardly any tools, too. I made a whole tutorial on how you can do it, too. So go now, watch that video, and make your own raised bed. You can find it right here.