Home Made Healthy: Installing Drip Emitters

The garden is basically ready now! The other day I installed all the drip emitters and last night I had Melody help me plant some pumpkin seeds. I just bought a couple packs from Star Nursery. It may be a little late in the season but who knows. It was just a trial run. What will it hurt? If anything maybe we will have a couple pumpkins by Halloween this year!

I really wanted to get some fertilizer for the soil before I planted anything but I didn't want to wait any longer to plant the pumpkins. I actually bought a soil tester kit from the nursery and tested my soil the other day. It wasn't that great. It definitely needs some nourishment.

My friend Lindsay over at HomespunSprout shared a link to some organic fertilizer that she bought from Azure Standard. It was only about ten dollars for a large 51lb bag. I thought I would check locally first and holy cow! It's so expensive! $25 for a 15lb bag! I guess I am going to wait until the next Azure order to get some from them.

In the meantime, I installed the drip emitters. I wasn't sure how many I would need or how much water I would need everyday. So when in doubt... Google it. Well in this case at least. What I found out was vegetables need about 1 inch of water per week. More if you live in hot or arid climates. Now after a ton more research and possibly some really bad math, I came up with some more numbers that were around 6 gallons of water per week for my planter size. I could be completely wrong here, so please do your own research. I ended up purchasing 1/2 gallon per hour emitters, which is the lowest I could find. My husband has the timers set for once a day watering for almost an hour. I may need to have him lower that time since I have the emitters space about a foot apart. I am taking this time as a trial and error period. I'm hoping I can figure it out without killing all the other plants in my backyard!

Here is the installation process of the drip emitters. I won't go into detail here, so if you are curious, do what I did and go on to Youtube. There are tons of videos on how to do this.

The kids and I stopped at our local Plant World to look for some fertilizer (that was way too expensive) yesterday. I thought Melody would enjoy seeing all the exotic birds and the coy pond they have there. I was right! She didn't want to leave. She enjoyed the turtles the most! At least she got to see some animals so it wasn't a total waste of a trip.