A little while ago I wrote about needing to find a watering solution for my raised gardens. Would it be a soaker hose? Would it be a portable sprinkler? Would it be a drip system?
I’ve used all of them over the years. Each has their pros and cons. Each also has a different level of cost and complexity. This year I really wanted something inexpensive and quick to install. I decided to go with the soaker hose.
If any of you have ever unwound a hose, you know what a bear (in lieu of using more colorful language) it is to do so. The hose keeps wanting to run in on itself unless pulling it out into a straight line.
For the raised beds, a straight line just wouldn’t cut it. Since the seeds and plants are planted more densely, the hose must be placed such that when on, the water will spread in multiple directions as the ground becomes saturated. This way all of the plants, whether next to or farther away from the hose, benefits. To have the hose work efficiently, it must lie in a snake-like pattern in the 4×4 beds.
It wasn’t that hard to actually decide where to place the hose in the bed, but it was a different story when trying to unwind the hose to lie flat on the ground. It often wanted to twist in the opposite way, which then lifts the hose from the ground. A rubber-ish material is harder to “twist”, especially when it’s 50-feet long. All was fine until I got to the half-way mark. It then felt like it had developed muscles of its own to fight back while I was trying to kind of cork-screw it to all flow in the same direction.
Finally I got it to work. To lie flat against the ground for maximum effect. Surprisingly, I was able to do three of the beds with one hose, meaning I’ll only need two hoses to make it all the way through the six beds. I was glad to see this was the case as I was worried about water pressure being able to fill up and push the water out the sides of the hose if I had to go to third one.
Everything was looking pretty good. The curves were where the curves were needed. The hose hadn’t collapsed against itself in some of the angles I had put it into on its route. The two ends of the hose were able to stick off the edge, one to connect to the additional soaker hose, and the other to connect to the water hose.
That’s when I realized my mistake. I hadn’t paid attention to the two ends of the soaker hose. The end cap was where the connection to the water hose should have been. What this meant was, if I continued down this path, the water and soaker hoses would have to connect at the furthest point from the house—not an ideal situation. Or, I could pull up all my hard work and reroute it, using another hour of so of my time to correct my error.
However, I thought of an alternative possibility…adapters. I could find female-to-female or male-to-male adapters to shift where the soaker hose would connect to the water hose. The phone came out of my pocket and the Amazon app was opened. After searching through a few adapters, and making sure my logic would be sound, I ordered the adapters to arrive tomorrow.
Mechanical thinking is not my forte, and this adapter thing is both spatial and mechanical logic. My prayer has been that I actually got it right. It feels like I did, but until those adapters are in my hands and tested on the hoses, I won’t know for sure.
Send good spatial and mechanical energy my way. May the force be with me!
Personal Reflections of a Middle-Aged Man 