low water pressure with drip irrigation

Hi, I've spent the money and placed the lines and find that the far end of the drip line is not dripping. We have 50psi of water pressure so I assume we should have enough? Can anyone help me? I'm new and spent a few days searching the site but can't find anything on this issue. We have a well and the garden is on a slight incline. I have 9 rows approximately 30 feet long. Each row has it's on line connected to the main line at the top.

Please help! My watermelons need water. I've been using the sprinkler on a timer but it is aging my straw too quickly and it was not cheap.

Amy in a very hot Texas

Can you tell us a little more about how your system is set up? For the 30 ft long stretches, how big is your tubing? Is it 1/2" tubing with 1/4" tubing off of it going to each individual plant, or did you run 30 ft of 1/4 inch tubing with dripper after dripper after dripper? You can only string a few drippers on one piece of 1/4" tubing without having problems, the right way to set it up is to have your 30 ft line made of 1/2 inch tubing, then wherever you have a plant or two, you put a 1/4 inch line off of that and attach drippers to it. You can do a few drippers on each 1/4" side line, but I think when I was setting up my drip system the instructions for my particular drippers said not to do more than 4 on one 1/4 inch line. And did you use pressure compensating drippers? Those are especially helpful on hills to keep the same amount of water coming out of each dripper (since it's your drippers at the bottom of the hill that are having problems this is not the root cause of your pressure problem, but it could become an issue when you fix the original problem).

If your lines are set up correctly and you're using the pressure compensating drippers, there are a few other things you can try. First would be to split up your drippers into a couple of zones and run them one at a time, that way the water doesn't have to go over all 120 ft of line all at once, you can split it into 30 or 60 ft chunks instead which will improve your pressure. Also, if you're using drippers that emit at a fairly high rate, you could switch to slower drippers. I think 1/2gph is the slowest kind, and honestly on a hill those might be the best to use anyway so that the water has a chance to soak in rather than running down the hill.

Thanks so much for the long, quick message. We've been plugging up some holes thinking that would help. But no. We have 1/2 inch black poly. I can't use the 1/4 because I plant seeds etc and that would not work. I researched before buying and found an article here that recommended Mr. Mister. Others liked it to so we went to Lowes and bought all the stuff. We could not, at the time, find any drippers so we just punched holes in the poly. Now we read in the literature that there is a brown hose that has the drip holes already in it and that is what I really wanted!!!! I believe the drip nozzels are pressure regulated. They do have pressure compensating drippers that we could install in each hose but I'm wondering if in the long run it would be cheaper just to get the brown hose that has them? Do we buy that and just spend more money?

We read that we should put the holes on the side so we did. Took a while in the heat. Now the water sprays too much! Ha. What a mess. I'm a bit discouraged because we spent $200 to have straw delivered and now the constant sprinkling is braking it down too much and the weeds are showing again. I need to get this irrigation system set up.

I will await your reply and then I suppose go to Lowes and try to get the correct items.

Thanks so much. My first year at a garden in many years and my greens are doing wonderfully in the shade even with over 100 degree weather!

Amy in Spicewood.

In the long run, if the brown hose does exactly what you need I think you'll be happier if you go get it--maybe you could eventually get something workable by trying to fix up the system you have, but if the brown hose will do exactly what you want you'll be saving yourself a lot of time, energy, and stress. Regardless of what you end up doing, if you still have pressure problems my suggestion of splitting it into different zones that run at different times is something you can still try.

Hi, Well, we spent some time but now it all seems to be working. We put the controlled drippers in every hole. We also made two zones. I really appreciate your help. It's great to finally have it set up. Now I can add more hay.

Can you suggest the best way to determine where to ask a question about watermelon? I am running mine up a fence and using panty hose to support the weight!

Thanks so much,
Amy in Texas

This forum is a good catch-all place for lots of different gardening questions, so you could just make a new thread here. Or you could try the vines & climbers forum since it is a vine, but most of the threads there are about ornamental flowering vines, so I'm not sure if anyone will know the answer (although someone may)