Drip Irrigation – Making the Garden Grow One Drop at a Time

When a person waters a garden, they’re trying to mimic rainfall.  Plants have evolved over thousands of millions of years to collect rainwater in one way or another, channelling it towards a thirsty root system where the nutrients in it can be sucked up into stems and leaves.  The evolution of plants has left the world with some pretty interesting methods of water collection – from root systems hundreds of metres in length to ingenious arrangements of shaped leaves, all “designed” to create an aquifer that routes falling rain water into “bowls” where the plant collects it.  All those years of evolution have been “working” towards creating water collection systems that maximise on a plant’s chances of catching some rain water – because, although lots of it falls from the sky, only a few drops end up actually feeding the plant in question.  It’s this discrepancy between the amount that falls and the amount that gets used, that makes drip irrigation work the way it does.

Drip irrigation works by taking away all those rain drops that a plant never gets to use – and feeding the ones it does get to use straight into its root system.  Think of it like this.  For every hundred rain drops that fall, a plant may end up directing one into its root system.  So for every hundred rain drops, 1% actually does some good.  Drip irrigation simply cuts out the useless 99% and leaves us with the active 1%.

Drip irrigation represents an “evolutionary step” in garden watering.  Gardeners have always recognised that plants have been “designed”, by natural trial and error, to collect rainwater, and so they have tried to make their watering methods as much like rainfall as they can.  Hence the watering can, the hosepipe and the sprinkler, all of which employ a method whereby multiple “raindrops” fall from the sky all over the plants’ leaves and flowers – just like the real thing. 

Drip irrigation is like the real thing, too – the real thing with all the useless bits taken out.  Effectively, drip irrigation is to garden watering what food pellets are to astronauts:  all the stuff that actually gets used, delivered straight to the digestion.  Drip irrigation is efficient and completely without waste.