Drip irrigation: After a one week vacation

So we left for vacation on Saturday, July 25, 2020. We came back just now- like magicians or in cars. Anyway, before we left we tried to find someone- anyone to water the plants that survived the first few months.

We realized some the week before that traffic cones can only be so helpful. We used something alternative later. Pictures to follow

Anyway, we have all these plants and we had no one to water my babies. Also I had just planted three blackberry bushes because I got them on sale. I am a sucker for a sale. We looked into many different systems but we decided that the easiest cheapest way was to use our old buckets and collect tidy cat buckets in order to set up drip irrigation.

We are not perfect people and this wasn’t even the ending amoung

Not going to lie, we were throwing this mess together the night before because we had to collect the materials

Into the wee hours of the night. It gets dark later during the summer. It is clearly night time.

It took quite a bit of time. We were collecting materials until the night before we left. Driving to strangers houses and asking for their little boxes the week before- to make sure we had enough. Fun Fact: we still didnt have enough.

He worked hard and tirelessly in order to the best he could with minimum light.

Anyway, it worked (kind of it turns out our neighbors will filling the buckets twice a day), so we are 90% sure we did it wrong. We screwed a hole into each bucket and the water slowly dripped out. My Aunt went back to check on her cats, so she filled up my buckets for me mid week and I thought that everything was fine.

I thought that the drip irrigation was lasting, per white bucket, 4 days, the tidy cat’s around 3.

We woke up super early to make sure

The blue berries loved it, they were looking yellow before. I think we’ll keep the buckets for our blue berries because the leaves look a lot better. I think that is because of the rain water. We need rain water collection and just found out that I don’t need to be watering my plants with tap water.

One of my daughters carrying a bucket to fill by the plants the morning before we left.

Regardless we only lost one plant the entire week because of a team effort. Now my neighbor (who I had no idea was an irrigation specialist) wants to help us.

What our almost complete system looked like. It still wasn’t the best, but we tried.

He informed me that this was not going to work for our long term plans and how water is the bones of any yard. I would need to figure that out long before I started mass planting like I want to next year.

Our one dead tree. It was still watered but I am pretty sure it isn’t going to come back.

We are going to start working on that tomorrow. This has been one heck of a learning experience. Hoping for future success.

Mimsy, our bunny chaser 💚