House & Garden Projects

Soaker Hoses: May-June 2003

First I lay out the soaker hose and stake it in the yard. I leave it for a couple of days. This helps get rid of the tight curl in the hose caused by being stored and sold rolled up. It's easier to manipulate the hose without having it constantly trying to curl up on you or trying to go a different way than you want it to. The I lay it out in the bed and stake it in place. I use U-shaped wire landscape fabric anchors.

I dig a trench under the soaker hose two to three inches deep, and bury the soaker in topsoil. I leave the "female" end of the soaker free to attach to the garden hose or feeder hose. (I don't have pictures of that process yet, but here's a picture of one soaker that's buried and connected to the garden hose.)

Next I mulch the bed, covering over the buried soaker hose. (Here's another bed with two soaker hose ends exposed -- one goes along the fence and the garage, the other goes under the fence and along the L-shaped side/front bed in front of the house.)

I cut a couple of lengths of short feeder hose to attach to the garden hose for instances where I run two nearby soakers at the same time. I bought a cheap garden hose to use for making these feeder hoses. One feeder is about four feet long and the other is twice that, because some of the nearby feeder inlets are across a sidewalk from each other.

This close-up shot shows the male and female hose ends I added to the feeder hoses, and the Y-connector which joins them.

We drag hoses all over the front and back yards to water plants in the ground and in pots -- I haven't completed the installation of soaker hoses in all the beds yet, and even then sometimes you need to give extra water to a newly planted flower or shrub. I only have one external faucet, so I have to split the supply. Right now that's done with two Y-connectors with individual cut-offs. Here's a couple of shots of the current set-up at the outside faucet. I have a larger brass splitter with four separate faucet outlets, but I haven't installed it yet. In the bottom shot, the circular yellow object on the ground is a water timer which I use from time to time. I got it free with a new sprinkler I bought this year. It works like a mechanical egg timer, and I'm pleased with the results so far. I'll probably get at least one more later this year.

And, finally, I ran 80' of hose along the east fence from the outside faucet to the back of the yard near the raised oval bed, and installed an "extension faucet" at that far end. Now we can attach another hose (here shown on a mobile hose reel) and water the back of the yard without having to drag hoses the length of the yard, or connect a 2nd hose to water the very back or outside the gate. I chose an inexpensive plastic faucet, which is actually meant to be a sprinkler pass-through, screwed in a flow control, and spiked it into the ground with the attached spike. It cost me about six bucks for the whole thing. They make more expensive "remote bibs" (bib is the proper term for an external faucet -- go figure!) that are made of solid brass, but I didn't feel like spending $35 or more at this point. I can always upgrade later.

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