Irrigation system for watering pots

[moominmama]

Hi,

I grow a lot in pots due to space restrictions - soft fruit such as blueberry, gooseberry, raspberry plants, and soft veg such as butternut squash. I do really well but watering is really time consuming, at the moment I am using watering cans, with large plant pot trays to hold water, and water from water butt when possible but they are bone dry at moment so using tap water.

i have 20(ish) pots

i am thinking about moving to an irrigation system

before i start researching i wondered if you use an irrigation system for pots that can link up to water butts and a tap? would you recommend it?

[GillyBee]

That one is a challenge. I have played with a number of systems over the years.

The Hozelock timer is good on a mains tap with drippers. The challenge with a water butt is that it would be really hard to get enough height to create the pressure for the drippers to work. This is usually viewed as a very economical on water system if the drippers are correctly adjusted.
https://www.hozelock.com/product/ac-water-timer-plus/

I was given a solar Gardena pump system as a gift and it is installed on a water butt into my greenhouse. I am not impressed as the watering time choices are limited and as a result I can only water one or two big pots with it The problem is that it just cant pump enough water. It might work to top up a sub irrigation container for several pots by not using a dripper and will pump about 1 gallon maybe a bit more in each 15 min period with an open ended pipe rather less if a dripper is fitted.
https://www.gardena.com/uk/products/wat ... 967999001/

I quite like the Autopot (also a gift) It keeps a steady couple of inches of water in whatever container it is placed in (e.g. a gravel tray) and just relies on a basic gravity feed from a container raised just a few inches. On the down side it is only useful for very big/tall pots unless you set it up with capillary matting and supports. Small/medium pots will drown the roots as I learned the hard way.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00 ... UTF8&psc=1

But at the end of the day I do seem to end up waving a hose at the pots or dragging the watering can around for far too many of them. If you have a bright idea, please let me know.

[ForgeCorvus]

We recently went away for a whole week. To keep the Toms and other plants in pots alive we used some of those plastic bottle drippers.... These

You still have to go around filling the bottles, but it becomes a less frequent job...... I suppose the important question is how much water does each plant need, because unless 2 litres lasts more then a couple of days you're back to square one

[korolev]

I've got one of these for when we go on holiday :
https://www.greenhousesensation.co.uk/c ... butt.html/

The only thing I found was I had to wang a load of PTFE round the water butt tap to stop it leaking.