Drip Irrigation for Raised Beds = Happy Plants & More Time

Considering drip irrigation for raised beds or a vegetable garden? If you’ve considered automating your watering, here’s my experience adding a drip irrigation system to my raised bed garden and foundation plantings.

Spoiler: Drip irrigation has been a game changer for my garden!

Note: I was not paid to publish this post. I purchased a drip system and was so thrilled with the ease of installation and results in my garden, that I wanted to share my experience with others. I became an affiliate of Drip Depot because I have used and value their product and customer service. I never recommend products I don’t believe in.

If you make a purchase at Drip Depot using my link, there’s no additional cost to you, and you help to support this site. Thanks!

Adding a Drip Irrigation System to Raised Beds

When we added six big raised beds to our small garden, I gained so much growing space and had better soil to work with than I’d ever had before.

But wow, do these beds dry out quickly! Which is great when it rains too much too often, but not so great during our many dry spells.

Keeping my garden watered sufficiently during weeks of no rain was a pretty significant time commitment, to say the least, and to be honest, staying out long enough to have plants watered well wasn’t always top of my list when it was hot and humid and the mosquitoes were out in force.

But what really pushed me to look into installing a drip system was taking a two-week trip in the early part of the growing season, when young plants really need consistent water to do well. What if it didn’t rain the whole time I was gone? Could I entrust managing watering to someone who didn’t know my rather complex garden? How much would I have to pay them for all that time if they had to come water every couple days?

Rather than chance it, I decided it was time to look into an automated drip irrigation system for the garden. And I am so, SO glad I did!

I’d seen a homesteader I like discussing one and decided to check out what she was talking about. That led me to Drip Depot, a company that does nothing but drip irrigation systems for vegetable gardens, raised beds, farms, and residential landscapes.

They had extensive videos explaining how to design and install a drip irrigation system for a raised bed garden, so after watching several, I got out some graph paper and set to work.

What is a Drip Irrigation system?

A drip irrigation system uses lines of tubing with tiny holes punched at set intervals to deliver water all over your garden with the press of a button (or a timer to do it automatically). You use lines of tubing placed where your plants need them, and when the timer allows water to flow, it delivers a steady drip of water for whatever period of time you tell it to.

The drip goes directly to the soil, so it prevents losing tons of precious water to evaporation and keeps leaves from getting wet, which helps prevent disease.

No standing around, no wondering if they’d gotten enough water, no beating yourself up when you’re too busy to keep up and your thirsty plants don’t get what they need.

Advantages of a Drip Irrigation System for the Garden

1. Saves Time (Often A LOT of Time)

While raised beds are wonderful for all sorts of reasons, when it’s time to water, you don’t typically just turn on a sprinkler and walk away.

Watering each bed deeply enough with a hose takes some time, and if we’re being honest, most of us probably don’t have the time or patience to stand there long enough to give them more than a shallower watering.

With a drip irrigation system, one button does it all. If you set an automated timer, you don’t even need to remember to go out and turn it on! (That’s huge for us distracted and overbooked gardeners.)

2. Saves Water

You may not realize it, but when you water with a sprinkler or a hose, a lot of water is lost to evaporation. According to the EPA, up to 50% of water used outdoors is wasted due to evaporation and runoff. So you may be paying for twice as much water as actually hits your garden. That means an efficient drip system can pay for itself in water savings alone.

Conserving water is one of many ways to make your garden more eco-friendly.

3. Brings Water Where Your Plants Need It

When you water from overhead, a lot of water will land on the leaves, rather than at the roots where the plants can actually use it. Wet leaves are more prone to disease.

A drip system, on the other hand, delivers the water slowly to the soil so it can get to the roots, where plants can access it.

When I came back from my trip, I found healthy, happy plants that had been kept well watered without my having to do a thing.

4. Remembers when you don’t

I’m really looking forward to trying this system out next spring. I don’t have a great track record keeping on top of watering in the fickle weather of spring in Minnesota, and germination can be pretty hit or miss.

I’m hoping to set up my drip lines early enough that my spring greens and salad turnips have more of a fighting chance than they historically have.

5. Can be designed to fit any garden set up

Whether you have raised beds or a traditional vegetable garden, a drip irrigation system can be arranged to fit whatever arrangement of plants you have.

In addition to bringing drip lines to my 7 raised beds, I ran lines to a foundation planting full of strawberries and herbs, several large pots, and an area where I grow beans and shade-tolerant herbs in a small plot of ground by the back door.

The kit comes with a punch that lets you put holes in the tubing and connect it to other drip lines, as you can see in the photo below.

You can splice in lines to run in numerous directions. Before we left on our trip, I moved the pots I’d normally have by the front and back doors next to the raised beds and ran lines to take care of them as well. If I want to move them back, I can just put in a plug where I added the lines.

This system can also be set up with multiple shutoff valves, so you can water just some of the beds if you choose. I’ll be using this feature more in early spring, when I only put seeds in one or two beds. That way I won’t be wasting water where I have nothing growing.

Disadvantages of a Drip Irrigation System

1. Cost

There is an upfront cost to a drip irrigation system, but I think it’s a very reasonable investment for your garden, especially if you consider all the time it buys you. Not to mention not paying someone to water while you’re away or losing plants due to insufficient watering.

Depending on how many beds or containers you’re trying to reach, kits can range from around $30 to water 10 containers to about $180 to water 6 raised beds. I found that with the 300 feet of drip tubing included in the deluxe kit, I had plenty leftover to run lines to other parts of the garden that I hadn’t planned to reach with the system. Bonus!

Note that you do need to take into account water pressure. We had ample pressure to extend where the system went, but you’ll want to follow the instruction videos carefully to make sure you don’t design a system too large for the pressure you have.

The kits are customizable, so you can start with what they suggest and add or subtract as needed. They have different kit suggestions if you’re installing it in a conventional garden or in a landscape rather than a raised bed.

I found the videos suggested things I didn’t wind up using, so you can save some by leaving those out. (See notes at the bottom of the post)

2. It may water when you don’t need it.

I chose a timer with a built-in rain delay that was supposed to detect when it rained and skip watering a day. But it’s tucked under an eave where the faucet is, so I’m not confident it really did that.

You can check your soil moisture and disable the timer if you find your soil’s getting too wet. I use a simple moisture meter like this one to remove some of the guesswork.

3. In cold climates, you need to take the whole thing out and stow it for winter.

I haven’t done this yet, and I’m never one for having more garden chores. This one seems worth it, though. We’ll see how it goes setting it back up in spring. I’ll add my experience to this post.

4. It will need to be replaced someday

Is this really a disadvantage? Everything pretty much needs replacing some day.

I’ve read that drip irrigation systems can last up to 20 years, and Drip Depot offers a lifetime warranty on most parts of the system. In that time, I fully expect to have saved waaaaaaaay more paying someone to babysit the garden when I travel, not to mention all that time I’ll have for other things. Plus savings on water that I’m no longer losing to evaporation.

Now that I know how set up works, getting replacement pieces or even a whole new kit won’t take much effort.

5. One line can’t reach everywhere

I grow a lot of perennial food in the area between the street and the public sidewalk, but I can’t run a hose to cross it and stay there. I suppose I could run a line near the elderberries, rhubarb, honeyberries, and fruit trees on the boulevard and then hook it up to a main line across the sidewalk when I wanted to water, but that would mean a lot of struggling with a connection every time, and they take some effort to connect and pull apart. Which is overall a good thing — you want those connections to be tight.

If there’s some sort of quick connect device, that might help address this problem in future.

There are also limits to the length of a single line, so you can’t just run lines for hundreds and hundreds of feet, or you won’t have enough water pressure to ensure water will make it to the end.

Why I recommend this customizable drip irrigation kit rather than a ready-made kit from Amazon:

If I hadn’t had the customization, I would have had to order multiple kits to cover the whole garden, costing probably close to what I’d paid and without the customer support and warranty.

Customer service was phenomenal. I had a lot of questions about the design, and my emails were all answered promptly.

Things I might have ordered less of:

The videos led me to believe I’d be using tons of elbows, but we didn’t find we needed nearly as many.

No single piece costs that much, though, so the extra pieces didn’t add too much extra to the cost.

Things I might have ordered more of:

I really liked using the little stakes they included for securing the drip line, and I used them up pretty quickly. I made do with some standard garden staples, but if I were doing it again, I would plan to get enough stakes to have at least one for every three feet of drip line.

So How Does the System Actually Work?

Set up is pretty straightforward. You attach a timer, pressure regulator, and filter to your outdoor faucet, then run a line from there to your first bed. You have all sorts of options for the type of connectors to use, so you can run the hose in multiple directions if you want.

You use a sharp scissors to cut the tubing to the right length, then hook up the drip lines to a piece of larger tubing that runs across the top of the bed. They recommend having drip lines placed about one foot apart, so two drip lines run the length of my three-foot-wide beds. You put a plug in at the end, and you’re done.

Run additional lines to other beds, to pots, or to landscaping plants you’d like to get water. Once you get the hang of installing the drip irrigation to the first garden bed, it’s really easy to add more.

Check out the videos at Drip Depot for a demonstration of someone installing the system. You’ll find relevant videos if you scroll down the product page.

Ready to get started? Head over to Drip Depot and check out their fantastic drip irrigation systems.

Save this info on installing a drip irrigation system for later!

Susannah

Susannah is a health and environmental writer focusing on gardening, foraging, medicinal plants, and sustainability. Her work has appeared in Mother Earth Living, Ensia, Northern Gardener, Sierra, and on numerous websites. Her first book, Everything Elderberry, released in September 2020 and was a #1 new release in holistic medicine, naturopathy, herb gardening, and other categories. Find out more and grab your copy here.