I couldn’t find anything in one place on the net that addressed the requirement, hence in part, this diary. Research over various areas yielded the following points:
• Fruit trees like to be slightly parched and then drenched
• Water them first thing in the morning
• The only metric I could find on volume was for each one inch of thickness give 5 (American) gallons per week, so 20 litres per tree per week.
• I will have to provide my own water pressure.
• One bar is 10m head of pressure
• 1000 litre cubes are common here but that’s a tonne of water
• No way am I building a 10m tower, maybe 1.5m is possible
• 0.15 bar is very low pressure.
Low pressure is a real issue. Forget soaker hose, it needs 2 to 3 bar. Forget most automatic timers; they need pressure to close the valve. So what I landed up with was:
• A Gardena programmer, works on no pressure, batteries will run for the season. The user interface is clunky but it provides adequate facilities to open the valve at a time, for a period, every whatever.
• An associated Gardena soil moisture meter. Bury it close to one of the trees and it’ll tell the programmer if it’s wet or dry when the programmer is debating whether to open the valve. How cool is that?
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