Last year my wife and I were veggie gardening rookies: I built a 4'x8' raised garden bed out of cedar, we planted, and actually didn't do half bad. At the end of the season we spoke with a "master gardener" at a county fair who told us why we lost half of our harvest: our irrigation method. I had, in my ignorance, been watering our plants via sprinkler at the end of the day. According to this gardener, this "top-down" irrigation method was leaving moisture on the leaves, allowing mildew/rot/disease to creep in. Apparently it also makes it harder to get the water directly to the roots, and so its inefficient as well.
This year I wanted us to learn from our mistakes. We went out and bought all our seeds and transplants, some extra top soil and compost, etc. Last weekend I got the soil/compost in the garden, and I thought we would be planting everything together this coming weekend.
Turns out my wife couldn't wait. She went ahead without me and planted everything in the garden basically according to the space each plant needs around it as well as by aesthetic appeal:
I was planning on doing soaker hose-based irrigation this year, that is:
- Putting everything (essentially) into an (x,y) grid
- Snaking a soaker hose back and forth betweeen the "axes" on the grid
But as you can see, we now have a hot, unstructured mess where instead of a neat, easily-irrigatable grid, we have "plant clusters". So I ask: is there any way for us to stay with soaker hose irrigation? If so, what might it look like and what special hardware would I need to snake around all of these "plant clusters"? If not, what is our best option for irrigation here?
