Dante's Garden

@JPedrego. Interesting. Did you mean crop coefficient Instead of efficiency with regards to going over 100%? What are you using for soil type?

Whoops yes I meant crop coefficient. I have it set to clay loam since I amended the native clay with compost.

That must be why (your soil type versus mine). Some family members built it and they used mostly potting soil, so I set my soil type to Loam. I’m sure there are better ways. Anyway, I think the clays retain water for longer.

I just finished putting up a shade structure tonight, with the hope that it’ll withstand monsoon season. In the fall I plan to re-work the container and soil, so I’ll be research the right way to do that between now and then.

Agree totally with you!!! I have two drip zones with a mix of perennials and annuals in them (plus an herb garden) and I don’t feel like I’m handling them just quite right yet. And while not as drastic as you, it looks like I am quickly going to be running into the problem where the daily watering is not going to keep up. (I have my MAD set to 25%) based on info I found on the NCRS web site http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/nrcs141p2_017640.pdf

“With drip irrigation systems, irrigate when 20% -25% of the available water in the active root zone is depleted.” And also it says "Crop growth is badly retarded after 75 to 80 percent of available moisture in the zone
is depleted. "

This is what I’m running into soon. Keep us up to date on your experience!!!

Yeah your soil will require more frequent watering.

Something to explore, I’m converting all my pots this weekend. If your annuals are on their own zone, http://store.rainbird.com/drip-low-volume/dripline-blank-tubing/et2551250-1-4-in-non-pressure-compensating-emitter-tubing-50-ft-black.html
That’s 1/4 inch!
Just serpentine that through your flowers and set the root depth and available water real high to,have that run for 3 hours through the day.

@Linn. Killer article. Thanks for sharing! It makes sense now when I consider having heard from a couple of landscapers that the garden frequency on drip is WAY more frequent than our trees and shrubs. I figured Kc was the reason, but it appears that the recommended MAD factors in too! I plan to dig into that article further, as well as look into the Kc stuff that @JPedrego has mentioned.

I’ll let you know how we get through this temperature peak. This is the first summer I’m trying to make a concerted effort to keep the garden going. Usually it’s a fall/winter/spring thing.

My flower/perennial zones setups are a real mess, set up by an irrigation guy a few years back that either didn’t know what he was doing, or didn’t care. So my worst zone is a mix of annuals and perennials and even misters (for my herbs) AND goes from almost full shade to full sun! It’s too expensive for me to try and fix any of it right now, so I’m trying to make sure that the annuals in the sun get watered to what they need and then hope that everything else will do OK. The zone is set up with 1/2" tubing, with emitters at every single plant, and it snakes through the beds. The huge majority of the emitters are 1/2 GPH, but I have replaced some of the ones on my hydrangeas with 1 and/or 2 GPH emitters. The zone has somewhere between 75-100 emitters on it. So I’m trying to make the best of a mess!!! I’ve been hoping that I might get some help from you and @azdavidr .

Sounds like we can all help each other out. Let’s keep the discussions going. Have you considered building up some shade cloth over the full sun area? It might give you a bit more uniformity given the other part that’s shaded. Of course you may not be able to if whatever you have planted there needs full sun.

Holy cow that’s a lot of emitters. Are the pressure compensating? With that many you could run into pressure issues for the ones at the end of the line if they aren’t pressure compensating

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You have hydrangeas? Do you live down the street from satan too? Big props for keeping such a delicate plant going in that sweat shop.

At least you are on drip. Like I said in the previous post, you can really jack your settings for the drip zone to trick rachio into running that drip zone for 3-4 hours, starting mid day.

Like setting your pr to .1 inch an hour leaving everything the same. But you moisture graph will not be accurate.

Like setting root zone much deeper, but your frequency might move too far out, probably need to move the co slider way up to counter this side effect.

I personally think the addition of the fixed is most scientifically accurate, but suffers the moisture graph issue.

With any luck, rachio will work on a satan prison rape defense module.

Honestly linn, when it cools down, you should take a shot as installing your own valve. I finally broke down and started doing that 3 years ago, the stuff is dirt simple, just laborious.

That is a lot of emitters, but it should work. Do you-know if he installed a pressure reducer? If so what psi rating?
Approximately how many linear feet of 1/2" are you running? At some point friction loss may be working against you, but even 100 emitters at 2 gph = 3gpm, easily within the capabilities of the system if were installed properly.

Was that controllet the Irritrol Smart Dial? If so, that product had the original smart controller technology with WeatherTrak. It used pager technology. The original WeatherTrak came on the scene about 16 or 17 years ago. It was a product years ahead of the industry, but had way too many dials and required training. That product is not in the residential market now. Pager technology is not used too much. But I sure like Rachio. Unfortunately many contractors area still obsessed with installing one brand of dumb controller. The madness continues.

Just an update on the garden. I used @plainsane’s suggestion of a supplemental fixed schedule to get me the added watering I needed when we had the 113-117F temps, had no shade to the garden, and Flex Daily was ‘bottoming out’. With the fixed schedule added I overshot the Field Capacity a bit but no longer bottomed out. Right around the time of the peak highs I finished the shade structure I was building, and changed the zone from ‘Full Sun’ to ‘Some Shade’. Between that and temps dropping to the low 100’s, I was able to turn off the fixed schedule, and even dropped the watering duration a bit to 31 minutes. I definitely recommend the shade cloth structure for anyone dealing with our type of climate. The vegetables/herbs are all holding up quite well for now.

We’ll see how this all stands up next weekend. The current forecast calls for 119F on Father’s Day!

Wow, that’s going to be one hot Father’s Day. I hope the Iro is designed to be outside in such extremes. Mine sits on the side of the house that gets the most sun. Granted, it’s in a Orbit box but still.

@Modawg2k Yeah, I was thinking about that today. Everything fries out here, but according to the tech specs we’ll have 21 degrees of margin, that is assuming the enclosure doesn’t cause the heat to rise more internally!

http://support.rachio.com/article/478-technical-data-generation-2

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You got me thinking about the competition.

Rainmachine:

Even with enclosures they recommend keeping it under 125F. I’m not sure that there are many places that would do well with 32F as the min. either. Even here it gets colder than that. Way to go Rachio hardware engineering ! :cheers:

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Man, when did Satan enter the holiday planning business?

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I wanted to work on my non-lawn zones earlier, but had to take a break as I had family in town. Finally had a chance to work on them again.

I’ve started with what I think is the simplest zone – it’s just two fixed-spray nozzles watering two beds of annuals (currently wax-leaf begonias) – My biggest concern was that how I had it defined was going to have the zone watering everyday, and still not keeping up – the ET was going to be bigger that the watering on a daily basis!

Here’s what I started with:

And how one of the predictions looked:

I took a couple of hours and set up a test zone (one that I’m not using) and tried to adjust just one factor at a time to see if I could get it to get the irrigation inches up to something that would match the Crop ET. My thought was that my lawn is doing great, but when it waters, it often puts down 2-3 times the amount of ET. And I’m thinking that water deeper, water less often is still good logic for annuals. Does my logic seem sound? Any thoughts?

I didn’t want to set the MAD higher than 25% based on some doc that I found online, where they recommended 20-25% MAD for drip systems with non-lawn plants. I played with the coefficient and quickly learned that it only effects frequency and not duration. So I left the coefficient set at 80%. I tried 3 or 4 different AW’s and found they had less impact on duration than root depth. I finally ended up changing only the root depth (set to 5 inches) and the MAD - (took it from 20-25%). That brought my irrigation up to .21 inches and I’m thinking that this is going to look better? (and as luck would have it, I haven’t gotten to test it out yet because our 20% chance of rain two nights in a row turned into good storms, and I haven’t needed to water at all! The rain sensor just deactivated today!)

Any thoughts? Am I on the right track?

Then on to tackle the tougher ones!

@Linn At first I thought you were on the right track. I originally thought about increasing my RZD to get the water needed to overcome the ET. However, it ended up not making as much sense when you think about the fact that you’re essentially sending water below the root depth if you increase RZD to be deeper than your actual roots. In that case, I’m not sure how much of the intent is being kept in terms of maintaining the moisture at 25-50%, within your root zone. I think they only real way to keep the root zone near 25% in your case is to add a supplemental fixed schedule like @plainsane recommended I do. Either that, or increase the shade to those plants, assuming that it’s practical and that they would stay healthy if you did so.

That link you posted above is great. As you mentioned, they talk about using 20%-25% MAD for crops with trickle irrigation systems. You mentioned fixed-spray nozzles. Don’t they have a significantly higher PR ? If so, you might be able to go closer to 50%MAD. I honestly don’t understand why they say 50% might be OK for overhead systems vs. trickle, but here’s what they say: