 Hello and welcome to the channel. So I just want to give you a bit of a view of my in-ground potato patch here. And I have been using the root stout method for the past three or four years where I just pile up the straw and hay in the fall and in the spring I just pull back some of this straw and hay. Place my potatoes directly on the ground. Don't bury them in and then just cover them up with more straw or hay. This has been working really well. Another really good benefit of using this method is I've been building up a really nice soil beneath all this straw and I'm going to take you up close and show you how over the past few years all of those leaves and straw and organic material has broken down and it's really created a nice soil underneath all of this straw. So today I'm also going to run you through my drip irrigation setup that I've got going here. As you can see I have some emitter hose strung throughout the garden. I've kind of got it placed out so that I will be doing about eight rows of potatoes and there will be a emitter hose dripping nearby each of those potatoes, which I think is going to really improve the harvest hopefully come fall of my potatoes. For the most part using the roof stout method is a way of kind of retaining that moisture so you don't have to water as often. We've had a really dry couple years last year you know I did need to add some water to this area even though you know I had it covered in straw. It just got so dry. So I figure you know putting in an irrigation system once it's in place is a hands-off watering method that I hope to spread throughout my whole garden here and I will take you step by step as I expand throughout the garden into my containers and other areas of where I'll be planting this year. So I have three kinds of potatoes chitting up this year. I got some Yukon Gold, some Red Norland and some Russets. So I purchased these three kinds of potatoes locally about three weeks ago. They are Saskatchewan grown seed potatoes and I see that they have lots of good sprouting happening on each of them. So it's time to get them in the ground and get them growing. So I'm hoping you can kind of see here. I have turned on the drip irrigation and this emitter hose has emitters every 18 inches. So when I plant the potatoes I'm just going to plant them about 18 inches apart near each of these emitters, then they can get the full benefit of that water. I believe the suggested spacing for potatoes is more around 12 inches, but because like I said, I have these emitters every 18. I think I'll just use that as my spacing guide. I am going to try and just bury these down a little bit. You can see we've got the sprouts here. So try to make it so at least some of them are pointing upwards. So as you can see here, now I've got them planted up. I think I've got nine in my rows here. You can see how the dripping is already getting to those potatoes. So I'm going to start off by burying the potatoes only. I won't be burying the dripping emitter, but I will be covering it up probably with a little bit of the hay and straw ones. Everything's ready to be covered up. So now that I've got the potatoes covered up, I'm just going to kind of lift this hose just so it sits on top. I don't want it to get plugged up and hopefully the moisture will soak through. I'm also going to secure it with some of these steaks that I purchased on Amazon just to kind of keep it in place. Okay, so two rows of potatoes planted and four more to go. Okay, so I just wanted to give you a visual of how I have my irrigation system set up and this whole configuration here is pretty much a basic setting that you would have to use for any type of drip irrigation such as what I just set up with my potatoes or if you're going to be using emitters or different types of sprayers in your containers. This is kind of your starting point of what you need to get going. So I'll just take you in on a close-up here of the setup. So first of all, you have your water source coming from your well or your house wherever you have a tap and this is the battery operated timer, which is just an optional part of this system, but I highly recommend it. You can obviously use it for when you're away. You can set the timer so it waters automatically while you're away from home or you can also manually set it for a certain time so you don't forget to shut it off. So I think that's very handy. And then after the timer here, we have this filtering system here. So this is good to have especially if you're using well water or rain water to filter that water, make sure there's no small particles of dirt or minerals or anything coming from your water that might clog up your irrigation system. And then after your filter piece here, you have the pressure regulator, which is also very important to have for an irrigation system. So what this does is just slows down the water pressure coming from your system here because coming out of the tap, it is way too high a pressure and it would just blow out a lot of your irrigation lines. So this reduces the water pressure down to 15 to 20 psi, I believe. And then after that, you have this converter piece that just converts from a garden hose attachment to the three quarter inch piping here. So this is going to be the start, the main starting point of your irrigation system here. So when I first was setting up and planning out my irrigation system, my hope was that I'd be able to use rain water that I collect in this IBC tote. We have a runoff here from this garden shed that collects rain water, plus we have several rain barrels at the house that get filled up really fast in a rainstorm. And so we just pump it into this tank. So I tried hooking up my system, first of all, to this part here and I found that the it's just not elevated high enough and the pressure was just too low. I couldn't seem to get a good flow throughout all my lines, just even in the potato garden here. It wasn't really taking the water all the way to the end of that system. So that was a fail. So from there, I tried using this submersible pump. This is how I've been watering my garden. Most of the time it's hooked to a garden hose. It runs on electricity. I submersed it into this tank and then I can just, you know, hand water with my watering wand. So I thought maybe this could work if I plug it into a timer and kind of run it the same way. But the other problem with rain water is it is very dirty. There was a lot of, you know, build up of LJ and leaves and dirt and bugs all in the rain water. So that clogged up my filtering system within like 20 minutes. So plan B didn't work. So plan C was to have to use well water. So we have a well set up really close to the garden here. And as you can see, we got a Y connection on it because we use this come summertime when the cattle move out to our land here. We use it to run it to their water trough and it's got a super amount of pressure. So it does work with an irrigation system really well. So I have my hose connected up to it and then connected here to the irrigation timer system. So the one downfall of using well water is that we don't really have the best water. It's got a lot of alkali in it. I think I'm going to maybe get it tested because I'm just not sure how it's going to affect my plants and the soil over the long term. But until I get a better filtering system figured out for my rain water, we're going to go with the well water for now and see how it works on the garden. So as you can see here, I got that three quarter inch line heading over to my potato patch and then I put in a tea fixture. It's one of the parts that you want to make sure you get when you're purchasing all your items for your irrigation is these on-off valves. You definitely want to set one up on each of your zones so that you can pick and choose where you want to water and not waste water in areas where they don't need to be watered. So by putting in this tea fixture that gives me the option to move on and set up another area with some irrigation. So that's where this three quarter inch line is leading us now and I'm just getting things ready to set up in my containers. So I'm really hoping this irrigation system is going to be a huge time saver for me. I found that last year I was spending every evening out watering for you know over an hour and it was just taking away from all the other things that you want to get done in your garden like weeding and fertilizing and just kind of working on your plants. So you can stay tuned and keep watching. I will keep updating you on how my irrigation system is going. It's kind of like Lego you know you get all the parts and you can just keep going and building and creating all sorts of different watering systems. So I'm hoping this is going to be a really good time saver for me this summer. So I hope you enjoyed watching me setting up my irrigation system and getting the potatoes planted under straw here in the garden. I will keep you updated on the growth progress of all of my vegetables. Please leave a comment hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching and happy gardening.