Community Home Community Gardening Vegetables What settings do you set for garden rows?

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  • #81403
    GlennGeo
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    I have been trying to chat or get a call back (their system keeps hanging up upon callback) from customer support with no response.

    I have a very well-tilled and amended garden area. Very loose soil with lots of compost, perlite, etc. Similar to light potting mix but with lots of organics. I have opted for drip hose with drip emitters every 4″ (aqua tape). There is no setting for gardens or this type of soil.

    What settings do you guys use?
    Does anyone else use Drip Tape?
    Are you adjusting the saturation setting after watering?
    How does anyone get support to contact them?

    Thanks,
    Glenn

    #81564
    UT-gardener
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    Glenn, I’m in search of some similar info.

    I have drip setup for our vegetable garden, and I want to take advantage of some of the “Smart Watering” features, but not all of them. I’d like the total desired run time to be broken out into a couple of watering sessions (to ensure good absorption), I’d like it to pause watering when rain is in the forecast, and I want it to water every day (sans the previous point about rain). But if select smart watering, the programming skip days.

    I selected Loamy soil as that seems most appropriate for our veggie garden’s soil.

    We opted for drip line (over tape) as we can run higher PSI and customize the outflow more precisely per the type of the plant (ex. using 5gpm heads for tomato and 1gpm for peppers).

    #81571
    GlennGeo
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    I was able to sit on the phone with tech support. I’m not sure I trust their advice on this but I can tell you what we did. For the specific garden zone(s), we did the following:

    Go to the “smart zone details” section.
    We changed “Soil Type” to Unknown and adjusted the basic intake rate to .40 in/hr (it goes to .60 in/hr) so adjust as needed.
    For “Plant Type” he said “Shrubs/Perennials” were the right option.
    –Here you’ll need to adjust the root depth of your plants. Take an average or even the deepest ones. Tomatoes and such can go pretty deep. I planted them deep so I put 10″ but adjust to your needs.
    “Sprinkler Type” we selected Drip. For the “application rate”, you’ll need to calculate the total run of each zone and determine how much water it puts down. My drip tape told me it was X”/100′ or something like that. adjust the rate/hr to match your drip hose.
    “Sunlight” adjust for your locale and specify the direct sunlight in the option below. I’m in CA so the sun beats down on it all day 10+ hrs.
    Adjust the “Rainfall” setting to match your locale. Mine is full exposure to sun and rain.
    Adjust the “Slope” to match your locale. Mine is flat.
    For “Head Count”, it doesn’t matter as much according to the tech. The real setting for this was the “intake rate/hr” that you set before. Mine is set to 20 for no real reason.

    Now the garden zone(s) are all set to run at 4:30 AM every day for a period of time, along with other zones. If you set the “smart watering” option, it will cancel the watering on rainy days and adjust up or down based on the weather. You should keep track of the zone “soil moisture” percentage which is adjustable. Check it out per day for the first bit and then once you have the approximate percentage dialed in, it will maintain that for you. It appears to be iterative and adjust as you provide more input.

    Hope this helps man. Good luck. This is a pretty cool system to avoid watering on rainy days. I noticed my garden did great last year and is already looking good this year.

    Keep us posted.

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    #81573
    GlennGeo
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    You would set up multiple watering sessions in the Program area. The adjustments, up and down to the length of the sessions, are handled by the smart watering feature.

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