Riego Continuado Continuado

The irrigation system. Each tree has a ring of 16mm irrigation tube with 3 pin pricks to let water drip out. Well, after a week it doesn’t. The holes are too small, and clog up. Or, plastic creeps, and the holes close again.

Engineer Jansen is now switching to Gardena Micro drip. Gardena wants you to use them as in the picture below, stuck into the end of their proprietary 4.6 mm irigation tubes. As you can see the drippers have a thread, followed by a tapered thing.

The good news is that a 4.5 mm hole in the 16 mm tubes fits this gap quite nicely. The wall of the tubes snap right between the taper and the nut, so the drippers sit tight. The 4.5 mm hole simply is made by hand and a 4.5 mm drill. Each tree gets 3, each bougainvillea 1.

Inside the dripper there is a small plastic cylinder that moves and sort of regulates the dripping. I hope this does not clog up...

Gardena has a whole collection of thingies in their Micro-Drip™ system. The orange drippers yield 2 liter per hour, the black ones 4 l/h. As I want the water to be spread a bit I give each tree 3 orange drippers. Ony the very big trees (Paulownia) get 4 l/h drippers. 

200 drippers (25 for €6,80, which is cheap, they're double in NL!). That is 200 holes punched with a tool I made from a block of wood and a drill, inserted by hand, give it a turn, then use the pipe wrench to screw it in, then push it past the wedge. Three days hard work. Pff. Now I only need to dig in the tubes in the ground, as plastic tubes and Andalucían sun are not a great match.

Have a look at all the various drippers, sprayers, etc etc, see below, or  on https://www.gardena.com/uk/products/watering/micro-drip/