Smart Irrigation Month on July, 2024: Drip Irrigation. Does it really save water money?

July, 2024 is Smart Irrigation Month 2024. Irrigation Association - The recognized authority on irrigation. Smart Irrigation Month

Drip Irrigation. Does it really save water / money?

MASTER GARDENER to the RESCUE!

Oy! Can DRIP save you money you ask? 75% of all fresh fruit & veggies in Israel is grown via drip. (I don't want to hear any ethnic "cheap" jokes) But since you brought it up... if it didn't save money, you think they'd use sprinklers? (i'm going to her from my ex mother-in-law about that remark)

Calling it DRIP is like calling a Lexas a Tin Lizzie. Drip or now known a "MICRO IRRIGATION" came into its own in the USA during the Great California Drought of the late 1980's to mid 1990's. Every month the localwater districts demanded every household use less & less water. In many areas of California the use of landscape irrigation was band completely. The exception being homeowners who had installed drip in their yard. The use of drip was never restricted at any time during the great drought.

Government officials when to Israel to study their extensive use of drip hoping to learn from them. The funny thing was that Israel was recieving almost all it's micro irrigation equiptment from companies located in California and Nevada. We had the answer to the drought in our own back yard & never knew it.

Can it save water and money? You bet! When the drought hit I lived on 3/4 of an acre & every inch was beautiful & lush. During the drought I cut water use on my property by 81% and never lost a plant.

Micro irrigation has come along way. We even designed away to use it under turf. The Texas Department of Transportation uses sub-surface drip to irrigate major sections of highway right-away. Not only to save water but to prevent accidents that were offten caused by broken sprinklers wetting the roadway.

As a horticultural consultant for CBS & NBC news, i did a short segment showing the installation of drip under sod. The stations phones were jammed for hours.

After drought restrictions were lifted, intrest in drip started to fall off as folks returned to their old wasteful habbits. But with the price of water going up and up, many smart home gardeners here in the west are having another look at drip. And the new drip is cooler then ever.

Cool new features like micro sprinklers that pop up when being used & disappear when off, just like their PVC cousins. Individual drip emitters that can be turned off or adjusted to fit the need at the moment and even spinner types for larger areas such as orchards.

When designed & installed correctly, micro irrigation is a beautiful thing to behold. It's use even has an extra positive effect by reducing snail & slug populations & greatly reduces the spread of diseases.

HOW to make gravity pump (not clemets site)?

HOW to make gravity pump (not clemets site)?

in:

you can see some draws... try it

High Lifter Gravity Pump ... Use water to pump water (no other power required). These pumps can provide up to 1200 gallons per day and lift water over 1000' straight up. A piston uses the pressure of water flowing downhill to pump a portion of the water up higher than the original water source. No priming needed. When there's water, the High Lifter starts itself. Easy to install

Inventor Sam Barzanji’s amazing gravity pump is nearest thing ever to a perpetual motion machine. Powered solely by the weight of water inside it, it can raise 9,000 litres of water a day, day in, year out, to a height of 60 metres, even out of a sludgy river. Sam was a top irrigation engineer in Iraq until, for being a Kurd, his house was shelled to bits in l997. Fleeing to this country, but unable to bring his family with him, he lived on benefits for the six months it took for his refugee status to be confirmed, then got a job delivering pizzas.

“Faced with an empty life,” he said, “I had to try to do something useful.” With some help from Business Link Wessex and a DTI Smart grant, field trials of Sam’s pump were recently completed at the Southampton Institute, Sir Christopher “Hovercraft” Cockerell’s old alma mater. At around £150, Sam’s invention would not only be two-thirds cheaper than the standard aid-agency hand-pump. Thanks to an un-named zillionaire philanthropist, it now looks to have a life-saving future in the world’s irrigation-barren regions.

Not that Sam ever stops. His latest invention, a so-called “edge-driven” pump has a cleverly suspended rotor with hole at the centre instead of an axle. The beauty of it is that it’s completely clog-proof, with any kind of waste being blown through the hole. Applications include sewage pumping, bow-thruster units for yachts, an intravenous micro-pump for people with slow blood circulation, and even as a motor for surfboarders who want to get out there fast and catch the wave. Following the Iraq war, Sam was able to speak on the telephone to his family for the first time in six years. “Now,” he says, “I have a very full life once more.”

Ancestry genealogy searches?

Ancestry genealogy searches?

"worth it" depends. You can fish with a custom-made split bamboo fly rod and hand-tied flies. You can fish with a $19.95 spinning reel from Wal*Mart. You can swim at a country club pool with a waiter who will bring you drinks with paper umbrellas, or in an irrigation canal. (At least we can swim in them here in California. I spent many a happy hour in MID Lateral #4 as a boy.)

I have the $159/year "USA Only" subscription, which works out to $13 a month, which is less than I pay for each bottle of wine if we have company. If you are 14 and earning $30 a month from a paper route, it would not be worth it. If you can afford $13 a month and would enjoy it more than you would, for instance, one movie ticket plus one drink and one popcorn, heck yeah! They have 99% of the censuses, and an amazing collection of other data; an incredible number of newspapers, for instance. I use it 3 - 7 times a week, for anywhere from an hour to longer than I care to admit in public. There are times I get so intense I get cramps when I stand up because I forgot to pee.

The Mormons are smarter. Today I found my "Jamison" ancestors as "Jamerson" and "Jaimaison" via the LDS site, after I struck out in a search with "Exact + Soundex + Phonetic" in Ancestry.com. But, Ancestry has more, and their soundex search is usually pretty good.

Holidays also on this date Monday, July 1, 2024...