Tomato Update: Weeding and Irrigation

Eric — Mon, 30 Jun 2003 00:00:00 -0400

My tomato plants look extremely healthy, but a little bit small. Weeding is pretty easy, thanks to an sharp collineal hoe. It's basicly a knife blade on a long stick, and you use it to slice the weeds off just below ground level. No bending, no digging, no cramps--and it's fast.

For irrigation, I use a soaker hose. This is a long hose which "weeps" droplets of water through the surface. I looped it around all the plats, and turn it on in the evenings if the garden looks dry. A soaker hose requires plenty of pressure to work--you'll need to fix any faucet or hose leaks, and you can't irrigate more than 75' or so before the pressure drops too far.

Since messing with hoses is time-consuming, I also picked up a bunch of ingenious GARDENA pluggable connectors which allow me to snap hose sections together. Some of these connectors automatically shut off the water when uplugged. They actually work surprisingly well, even under the high pressure needed for soaker hoses.

I don't know how well the soaker hoses or GARDENA connectors hold up; we'll see what happens by the end of the summer.

Random Hacks: Tomato Update: Weeding and Irrigation

Tomato Update: Weeding and Irrigation