I’m learning that 💦 water is a complicated topic, or at least it goes much deeper than I originally surmised.

Water is at the heart of our civilization – where to source it, how to treat, who gets it, how much they pay for it, and how much we’re allowed to use (or at least supposed to use). Something like 3/5ths of my city’s budget goes to something water related and I’m guessing it’s not far off for most of you reading this – which is a good reminder that you can typically find your town or city’s fiscal budget online to verify.

It takes a lot of work to make clean water magically come out of your faucet. You should be curious about this. 🤔

Water is also at the heart of the data center debate. In short, all of the AI that everyone enjoys doesn’t come free. It requires the creation, operation, and maintenance of a vast army of data centers, along with the creation of a mega ton more of them. Data centers are thirsty creatures. It takes a lot of water to run all the cooling systems.

I spent decades working in data centers as an engineer – the guy you’d send to go rack and stack stuff into rows of cabinets – and can attest that the internal water pumping facilities are second only to maybe the backup generators in terms of size and priority. Here’s me sporting a Beyonce shirt (as one does) while doing some cabling in a data center in California.

I bring this up because I hear grumbling about data center proposals a lot, especially here in Texas, mainly because we’re already a drought prone area with high electricity prices and more data centers just makes it worse.

Interesting times!

OK, with that out of the way, let’s talk constructively about water usage as it relates to raising crops and all the ways I’ve goofed and learned while setting up my “micro farm” with drip irrigation lines. I think it’s important to get squeeze every dollar you can out of the water used while also tipping a hat towards water conservation.

Getting Started

I try to be a good steward to the water in my area. When I bought my home in 2022, it came fully loaded with an army of 🫗 irrigation sprinklers (small water throwers) and rotors (big water throwers) to keep about a half acre of grass alive. It’s all a bit overkill and I could really care less about wasting water on grass, but it is nice to have a system in place to distribute water.

As I continue to build out more planters to grow organic food, which requires the removal of grass (yay!), it also means having to rethink how the irrigation system works. I’m obviously not going to want water being “thrown about” needlessly by spraying against the side of my raised beds. I want the water to go directly to the roots of my crops and driplines of my fruiting trees. And my crops are going everywhere the sun shines, which is 75% or more of my land.

See the little rotor working hard below, diligently spraying the wall of a planter. 😂

That means I need to figure out how to alter a system originally designed for grass to become a hybrid, mixed-usage system for trees, planters, and a small amount of grass.

It turns out this is a non trivial problem to solve. Too much water to the crops invites blight, bacteria, disease, and rot. Too much water to the grass is just wasteful and also creates homes for mosquitos and other harmful insects. I’ve been wrestling with the re-design of the irrigation system for most of the year.

Oh, here’s some random 🌼 Gerbera Daisies, aren’t they beautiful?

I thought that perhaps some of you out there are also in a similar boat. Maybe you want to grow some food but keep your grass alive. Maybe you have an irrigation system and want to change its behavior. Heck, maybe you DON’T have an irrigation system and just want to hook up to one of your hose bibs (“the hose”) outside so that you can go on holidays without having your plants die.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far. Take it all with a grain of salt, I’m still new at this.

The Basics

Irrigation systems are pretty simple machines.

You run a length of PVC pipe underground. You attach riser assemblies (also referred to as “funny pipe” assemblies) to connect the main line to a sprinkler or rotor head. Sprinklers use a 1/2″ connection while rotors use a 3/4″ connection. The head is buried about 6″ underground with just the top peeking out and inside are some mechanical bits, a filter, and tech to prevent water backflow.

With my system, about a dozen actuator valves are located in the pipe that leads to various groups of sprinklers. Each group is a zone. When it’s time for the zone to water, a solenoid opens the valve. This is controlled by an irrigation controller, which is just a dumb electronic component with a timer and a schedule.

With the valve open, the city’s main water pressure sends water down the pipe and the water pressure builds in the target zone section of the pipe. The heads throw water based on their design. That’s kinda it. Pressure does all the work. The only electronic bit is the controller telling the valves when to open or close, and the system is designed to fail safe meaning that the solenoid naturally closes when losing power.

Converting from Sprinkler to Drip

In my back yard I covered up much of the previous lawn space with raised garden beds. For each garden bed, I stole a sprinkler head and converted it into a drip connector to directly irrigate my crops. My sprinklers are Rain Bird 1800s and my rotors are Rain Bird 5000s. Converting them requires buying a retro kit, which taps into the same riser assembly, along with a 3/4″ to 1/2″ adapter when replacing a rotor. Instead of throwing water around, however, the retro kit terminates into a 1/2″ tee or elbow connector for a drip system and only contains a water filter inside.

You’re basically ripping out all the fancy engineering from the sprinkler and stealing the water for other usage.

For digging a hole like this, don’t be an idiot like I was and use a shovel. It’s grueling work and you have a high chance of cutting the riser. Go with an edger tool or, better yet, get a Hori Hori knife. WAY EASIER. I love this knife.

I used 1/2″ flexible tubing or “distribution tubing” to get water from the retro kit to the planters. It’s worth noting that 1/2″ is not necessarily the diameter of the pipe but more of a rough estimate of size. The outer diameter, often labeled “OD” on the product, is variable. Some outer diameters are 0.63″ or 0.65″ or 0.70″. This actually matters when it comes to connecting the distribution tubing to fittings.

Fittings, such as elbows, tees, ball valves, and the like all expect a certain size tubing. If you have a fitting designed for 0.65″ tubing, but you try to force 0.70″ tubing, it’s not going to work because the dimensions are not the same across parts. In short, pick a size and make sure your tubing and fittings are designed for that size. I went with 0.65″ for all my parts across all projects.

Here’s my parts list if you need one: Elbow, End Cap, Valve, and Tee.

💡Tip: Keep a checklist with all the parts and components you’ll need, especially when going to buy them on Amazon or at your local hardware store. Since 2013, I’ve been using Todoist for task tracking and collaboration. I’ve completed over 17,000 tasks as a paying customer. 😲 I’m also a Todoist Ambassador! If you’d like to try it out for free and directly support the blog, here’s my referral link.

If you’ve ever worked with pipe or other types of tubing, distribution tubing is child’s play. No sweating like with copper. No cementing like with PVC. Everything is held together by compression and pressure. Monkey put fitting into tube, monkey get banana. And cutting distribution tubing can be done with a sharp knife or even scissors, although I prefer to use tin snips because they are comfortable, powerful, and leave a clean cut without making my hands sore.

Here we see the Plant Manager asleep on the job. AS USUAL. 🤣

Fittings use a “barb” connector, which looks like an oversized ring around the opening of the fitting. As the tubing is inserted over the fitting, the barb slightly expands the tubing and presses against it, thus forming a compression fitting. I like to use fittings that have a twist-on cap that goes over the barb. They look cleaner and are super strong. I tried to rip a tube apart from the fitting by hand and the joint held just fine. Plus, when water pressure is applied to the tubing, it just makes the joint stronger. Kinda cool.

Modular Drip Irrigation Design

Here’s where you get into the 31 flavors problem – there are infinite ways to drip water into a target crop. From directly hooking your distribution tubing into a planter and just poking holes into it, which is the first thing I experimented with (picture below), all the way to setting up “railroad ties” with 1/4″ tubing leading directly to plant roots.

I have a few opinions here.

FIRST, fall in love with ball valves. I sure have. These are quarter turn shutoff valves that you put in line of your distribution tubing. Every retro kit I’ve installed leads first to a shutoff valve because there will be times that I want to disable a planter from receiving water for maintenance, weather, or seasonal rotation.

SECOND, continue to fall in love with ball valves. Any time you setup a major artery, install a secondary shutoff valve so you can turn off the water to that artery. For example, I have a planter that is a mix of Texas all-year crops (tomatoes, peppers) and Fall weather crops (lettuce, carrots, onions). The distribution lines feeding these little guys all have shutoff valves to them. As an added bonus, the shutoff valve can also be used to control the water pressure to that line, meaning I can halfway close a valve to deliver roughly half as much pressure and thus half as much water. You don’t have to go crazy with valves here but I do like having them anywhere I might want greater control over the downstream water consumers.

Below is an early design for my first planter box. Each downstream consumer line from the manifold has a shutoff valve that controls (or terminates) flow.

THIRD, keep it modular. I tend to think of each distribution line like this: main feed, manifold, consumers.

Main Feed

The main feed is the water coming from the retro kit and is simply the shutoff valve and any fittings needed to get to the box. Below, I’ve run about 10 feet of distribution tubing to a planter box and troubleshoot the flow before burying the line 4″ in the ground. The main shutoff is at the planter to avoid having to walk all the way to the retro kit.

Manifold

The manifold is the various tees and elbows coming off the main feed in order to get water into all the downstream consumers. For most of my raised beds, I setup a manifold with 4 consumer ports. Each consumer port has a shutoff valve.

In the photo below, I learned that I could gain more stability against tubing movement by threading the consumer lines through a hole in the planter side wall and terminating an elbow fitting in the hole. I measured the manifold size to match the distance between crop rows, built the manifold as a single assembly, and then installed it into the planter wall.

Consumers

Consumers are the lines leading to my crops and trees. These should require the least amount of effort and maintenance because I don’t want to be controlling water pressure at this level of granularity if I can help it.

In the consumer line below, I’m using 8-way drip sprayers tightened down to about 3″ of throw distance to keep my green onions hydrated. These seedlings are about 5 days old. I suggest using lawn staples or wire stakes to keep the consumer line where you want it. Oh, and definitely grab a hole punch tool for inserting drippers to make the job easy and clean.

And just for fun, here’s a cute little baby spinach seedling.

Tomato and basil get 1/4″ tubing pointed right at their roots. I use a pair of 2 gallon per hour (gph) emitters for the tomatoes and one for the basil. Use the hole punch tool on the distribution line, insert the emitter, and then direct the 1/4″ tubing directly to the root zone and use a drip support stake to keep the water pointed in the right direction.

Another view of the tomato dripper.

Here’s some romaine lettuce receiving water from two different consumer lines. I keep them located in the center row of the planter for this reason. Big fellas like leaf lettuce, head lettuce, and celery take up this space.

My main feed and manifold designs are fairly consistent across planters and only really change and evolve as I form new opinions on how to do things better. But the consistency across planters is part of the design. Consistent, simple engineering is easy to copy, maintain, and troubleshoot. The consumer lines are the only things that really vary across planters because the way I water a tomato plant with spot emitters is not the same way I water lettuce, for example.

Scheduling Grass and Crops

While it would be great if my watering zones didn’t have a mixture of grass and crops in the same zone, changing this would require digging up much of my yard to install new irrigation actuators and solenoids into the main line. Maybe some day, but for now, no thank you.

I’ve tried to balance my zone watering schedule for the crops and trees. This means scheduling two deep watering sessions per week. Beyond this, I hand water the seedlings because they need daily moisture, sometimes twice a day, while they build their new root systems. Everything else for the grass has been capped.

Capping is a way to stop water from emerging from a sprinkler or rotor. You have some options here.

For sprinklers, I bought the Rain Bird caps. Remove the existing cap, screw in the cover cap, and you’ve stopped them from being sprinklers anymore. I like this. It doesn’t require me to dig into the ground and monkey with the assembly. You apparently have to buy the vendor’s cap, you can’t get a generic cap or use some other vendor’s cap from what I can tell.

For the rotors, unless you have a fancy rotor with a shutoff feature, your only option is to dig up the rotor and cap the riser assembly with a literal screw-on cap, either a 1/2″ cap for sprinklers or 3/4″ cap for rotors. In my case, I’ve stolen all the rotors to become retro kit recipients for raised beds. But I think there’s also an option B – install a retro kit into the rotor slot and then use a shutoff valve to terminate waterflow. I like this option better because it saves you a future water source if you ever need it.

Conclusion

I have such a love for irrigation. It feels a lot like building modular systems for tech, especially pipeline automation, but with something tangible and alive that gives back food in return for my efforts.

This has been fun to write. I hope you enjoyed!

✌️ & 🩵