Watering trees

Our county is having a bit of a droit this summer. I'm fighting not to lose my fruit trees and bedding plants. I'm looking for some creative ideas how to move water out to the plants that are several hinder axe yards from our water source. I've thought about a poly tote like the ones used in industrial applications but that requires loading and unloading the tote between uses. Does anyone have a workaround that is easy to use and doesn't cause more problems than it helps?


Greg

I use totes under my barn gutters, the run a hose to trees. Most tree farms will tell you that trees would rather have rain water than well water.
Led

I agree we would prefer to use rain water, sadly we haven't had rain here in about 7-8 weeks.

I have an old Army 800 gallon water tank mounted on its own trailer and have a water line from a spring that runs gravity flow down from the mountain on my place that I fill the tank with then take the tank around with a tractor to whatever needs water.

If a storage tank is too expensive you might get several poly drums and load them on a trailer. Still it's going to be an uphill battle. Each tree uses hundreds of gallons of water every day.

Cheap 1/2 inch black poly pipe can be had for less than 20 cents a foot.
200 yards=600 feet x .20 = $120.00 and nothing to carry around.
Probably loose a little pressure on the long run but moving the end of a hose around sure beats hauling water.

1000 gal tank in the back of a grain truck with a gas driven pump at the dugout works well.

Tractor bucket with a tarp in it works if the route is not too bumpy.
Straw mulch or grass clippings to slow down evaporation.

That rainwater running off 30 year old barn shingles is not that pure.

I agree with Determined, run vinyl tubing to the trees.

Then put a loop of "emitter hose" (not soaker hose) around the drip line of each tree. The emitter hose has tiny metered holes that allow a small amount of water to drip out. The flow is small enough that all the hoses build the same pressure regardless of the distance or order, so all deliver the same approximate volume. You can pretty much leave the water on full time.

Then cover the hoses with grass clippings or bark to hold the moisture.

You can buy the hose and fittings at HD, Lowes, many hardware stores, garden supply. They have charts showing the flow rates, line size, pressure recommendations. They do require clean water though.

My first thought when reading the title of
your post was this was going to be about the
advantages of being a man

I clean and rinse my poly sprayer tank (600 gallons) out about three times with herbicide cleaner and add a side delivery flexible hose on a fiberglass mast. I used it to water 4 legacy oak trees and about 50 crepe myrtle trees during our 2 yr drought a couple of years ago. I have a couple of deep wells with 2 inch fill hoses that can fill the tank in less than 15 minutes. I was putting 1200 gallons around each tree along their drip lines per watering and about 50-80 gallons around each crepe. I used a wide dispersion nozzle to prevent soil erosion when using the pump to pressurize the nozzle. Sometimes I would just park the tank and manually drain the water if I wasn't in a hurry watering the trees but I always used the pressurized method on the crepes as I would just drive down the line and unload at each trees. Never lost a tree or crepe that I watered. It is much better to soak the tree rather than lightly water more frequently. It is estimated Texas lost over 600 million trees during our 2010-2011 drought. We had temps over 100 degrees for over 84 "straight" days without rain, and it was brutally hard on our Bermuda hay fields but mine survived somehow. We need rain again but nothing yet like that last drought.