Retrofitting

I have two planting beds that are embedded in the patio, which I use for veggies. Originally we had extra sprinklers in the garden beds along the fence that faced out to the patio, so that those beds got watered, too.  But we took those heads out a few years ago because they really didn’t work very well – when I had tall plants like tomatoes in the bed closest to the fence, they blocked the spray from getting to the second bed, and it also wasn’t very healthy or efficient to be watering them that way anyway. Since we took them out, I’ve been watering the beds by hand. I didn’t really mind that too much, but it was a problem whenever we went out of town for more than a couple of days.

After retrofitting the sprinklers in our front yard for a drip system (we have no grass, just a big planting bed), we thought that might also work for the beds in the patio. My husband dug down in one of the beds and tunneled under the bricks to connect into the existing sprinkler line.

Then he ran another line to the second planting bed. Each bed now has one retrofit drip conversion head, which will allow me to run up to 12 drip lines from each head. They have a high-flow output, since they’ll be running at the same time as the traditional sprinklers on the line.

The head in the bed on the right is between the first two solar lights:

Now I’m all ready for summer planting! Which is a good thing, since we’re having June weather in April.

In the meantime, I couldn’t resist getting a color bowl to spruce up the deck: