Low Pressure, Low Cost, Low Input Irrigation

We're still buried in winter here - the peepers haven't even started peeping, and I suspect we won't hear them until the weekend with night temps in the teens here and ice still on the pond and swamp.  That will make it the latest I've ever heard them.  Despite a warm winter, March was one of the coldest on record.  It is supposed to warm up to early spring temps later this week, but right now it is COLD.

Still, sooner or later, the garden will go in and spring will come, and for many of you in warmer places, water will go.  Last year's hot, dry garden was unusual for us, we rarely have to water any plants in the ground (and we've had summers so rainy I barely even watered my CONTAINER plants), but last year did require watering.  For those of you looking for easy, low input ways of providing low-pressure irrigation, here's a cool one.

I have to admit, I'm lazy about water issues - we live in a wet, wet place.  At one point we lived on less than 10% of the American average for water consumption, but have crept up to about half the average American household (which isn't quite as bad as it sounds, since our household size is 3 times that of the average household.)  But the truth is that I should be more careful, because it may not always be that way - and for many of us, it already isn't.  As my ScienceBlogs colleague Peter Gelick observes, water is NOT something to take for granted.  There are hidden water costs is almost everything.  The good news is that home-scale agriculture, done wisely and carefully is almost always more efficient even in dry places than shipping food across the country (which is also often done from dry places to wetter ones, and functionally transfers water-rich produce from water-scarce places like California to wetter ones like NY.)

Sharon