If you plan to make a lot of compost tea, you may want to invest in a small pond aerator to put into a large barrel – this will save you having to constantly stir the tea. Putting oxygen into the water with the compost activates all the microbes and lets them multiply. The compost tea as a foliar spray is one of the best fertilizers for all of your plants.

It wasn’t as hard as I had imagined it was going to be in the set up. We laid 1/2″ tubing down the center of the bed, and then punched holes every 6 feet. We assembled (screwed on) the emitter heads and assembled the stakes with the emitters. We then hooked the 1/2″ tubing to thinner tubing that connects to the stake and emitter. The heads spray in a full circle (you can get other emmitter types) and we set them approximately 6 feet apart, so that there is overlap. This gets across the entire bed. It took about a half an hour for all of it.

One of the reasons we are trying something different than the drip tape, is that with the prolonged exceptional drought I have noticed that the water hasn’t been weeping out laterally from the drip tape. Prior to the drought, the water seepage would get 12 inches laterally from the drip tape. Now the lateral seepage is about 4 inches. I had to start using my big sprinklers to get the soil moistened enough to increase the lateral seepage. I know in talking with a friend of mine who owns an olive orchard with sandy soil that she has always had that problem with watering her trees. With sandy soil, channels are created through the sand and if there isn’t an overhead spray pattern, the water will just run through the channels and miss all roots of her trees. So after a couple of years of trying drip irrigation, she turned to more low water emitters that are full spray patterns to get more soil saturation.

We plan to install at least one more daylily bed this way and see how this new watering plan works during the summer. In our iris beds we will continue to use the drip tape since the roots of bearded iris tend to go more straight down, rather than lateral. Of course, with my luck it will start raining every week with at least an inch of rain per week now that we have installed this new irrigation, and that would be just fine with me.