Extending the Irrigation System.

 Irrigation Extension to the Greenhouse and an Additional Tap.

It is so useful to have water readily available in the vegetable garden. I installed one tap a couple of years ago but as the vegetable garden has grown I thought that, while extending the irrigation system to the Greenhouse, I would take the opportunity of installing a second tap which would allow for a greater irrigation range and less long hosepipes dragging across the garden.

Most of the pipeline used was 3/4 inch (20mm) PVC with connectors PE (20mm). For the greenhouse I think that this is overkill as the amount of water needed in the greenhouse is a little but often however I wanted as much as possible to keep all the fittings the same size to make the installation easier (I always end up needing more fittings with an extra trip back to CWS in Mot, who are very helpful even for small orders).

The installation did require a bit of trench digging which took some time, probably not best to do this in the height of summer when the soil is pretty solid but ......... That's life.

Installing a tee (the soil is pretty dry and the trench pretty shallow). I normally leave the trench open where I have installed connectors etc until I have tested the lines to make sure that there are no leaks. 

The hardest part of the job was drilling a hole through the blocks at the back of the greenhouse. This took ages due to my drill not really being up to the job, but got there in the end.

And another tap installed in the Vegetable garden. I STRONGLY recommend using metal fittings as these last much longer and help to avoid cross threading any connectors (which drives me crazy as once a cross thread has started it is impossible to get the thread back and the connector is then useless).

I will do another blog on the irrigation inside the greenhouse next month.