How to design your garden irrigation – Step 1

How to design your garden irrigation – step 1 – design it yourself or commission a company?

Have you just decided that your manual skills combined with your love of gardening will save you some pennies and make your own irrigation system? After all, your neighbour, friends and half the family headed by your brother-in-law have managed it, so why can’t you design and make the irrigation yourself?

In the end, you will save more than you spend and will be able to walk proudly through the neighbourhood telling how smoothly it went, while thinking of a new idea for a neighbourhood business. The facts are clear and convincing. The cost of the materials for an irrigation system is a maximum of 50% of the value of the entire service, which you might as well outsource to a company. But do you really want that ?

Then I have a suggestion for you, which we will start with a one-brainstorm. Think about it, have you ever seen a properly executed irrigation system design with your eyes and are you able to reproduce it on your plot ? There is a very good chance that you don’t have the faintest idea about it, and the last irrigation system you heard about was the one from a history lesson about ancient Egypt and its Nile flood irrigation . So don’t try to understand why two circular sprinklers planted in the middle won’t irrigate your garden, but will only cause problems. Don’t stare blindly at Youtube videos and don’t listen to gardening “magicians” on internet forums. Just trust whoever you need to trust. It may be hard to believe, but there are still specialists in the world who will “lead you by the hand” and restore your faith in people.

So the answer to the question of who should design your irrigation system is clear. Let us do the work, and you’ll still got a lot to do. Someone has to dig a few dozen metres of trench and connect all the pipework together. Sound like a challenge? Well, here we go.

Whether your irrigation is a whole garden, a small hedge, a greenhouse with tomatoes or pots on the balcony, let’s go higher. Maybe it’s irrigating a large blueberry, strawberry or raspberry plantation. Let it even be the irrigation of a football pitch or other sports facility. In any of these cases, you need to remember where to start working with your designer. For your mutual benefit, meticulously prepare to send the following information to the designer.

– Site plan (to scale): this can be either a finished design from an architect or a site plan drawn by you on a grid sheet. It is important to keep the scale of the drawing

– Type and capacity of water source: determine whether it is city water or a well with a pump or a rainwater harvesting tank. If municipal water then do a bucket test (more in the next article), and if it is a pump then take a photo of the nameplate and send it with the development plan.

This information will allow you to make a customised design for your irrigation system and prepare a price quote for a self-assembly irrigation kit. This is the so-called first stage of irrigation system design. In the next article we describe this design part in more detail.