 Alright, good evening everyone. I'm going to be speaking about drip irrigation tonight, primarily for home gardening and be applied to other larger agriculture as well. So what I'm going to be talking about here, just from an agenda point of view, I'm going to do a quick introduction, kind of explain why I was interested in drip irrigation, why I've kind of pursued this, why you might also want to pursue it. Then I'm going to go into what are the basic components of drip irrigation, what does it actually take to install this, and then finally we're going to talk a little bit about what it takes to design a system for your own home. So who am I? To start with, I am definitely not an expert on this subject at all. I am an IT consultant that just happened to want to install a garden in my backyard. I live in a very suburban environment and I work a lot of hours. I travel a lot, I do a lot of these type of things, and I found in my first year of gardening, I probably spent more time watering my plants than I did anything else in my garden. More time watering than I did weeding, more time watering than I certainly did harvesting, and I wasn't very pleased with the harvest that I got at the end of the year as well. So the season wasn't that good. So I prefixed this by saying I'm not an irrigation expert by any means. I am speaking about this just from my own personal experience and what I've been able to research on it. But I'm sure that there's others out there that can give you a lot more detailed information about how this works. As I had mentioned, why I'm interested in this is that I was looking to start a garden. Personally, it was more about getting closer to my food. I wanted to be more familiar with where my food is coming from, the quality of my food, and so forth. And fitting in with the Oak Keeper side of this, it was about prepping as well in the sense of being prepared to supply my family with food beyond what I can just get in a grocery store. As I already kind of explained, I am in a very suburban environment. So I have a small backyard. I have neighbors on all sides of me. I also live in an area of St. Louis County that is plagued with a lot of pests, deer, rabbits, squirrels and so forth. So for me, when I was designing my garden, I was looking for something that I could do that was a little more resilient to those type of things. So I ended up going with a container garden. My initial garden was nothing but a bunch of containers that literally lived on my deck. That way, the deer were not quite brave enough to come and eat my food. Eventually, I kind of graduated to a larger garden and I now have a more raised bed style garden. And I'm using some other interesting techniques that keep the pests away. But having a container garden brings with it a number of, you know, some challenges in terms of watering. If you're using a standard taricata type of a pot or you're using a plastic type of pot, it's very, very easy to overwater your plants and soak them to the point that their roots rot and the plants die. That was definitely a concern of mine. So I researched some ways of being able to handle this. And one of the ways that we went with is decided to use essentially a landscaping fabric-based pot instead of a taricata pot. That essentially makes your pot more like a raised bed than an actual container type garden. And so the water in it wicks into the ground below it. And again, it becomes more like an extension of the ground than just a container. But all of this was kind of leading me to I needed a way of being able to manage my water beyond just going out there with a hose and watering it every night during the hot summer. So that is really what I was, you know, what kind of led me to this decision to investigate irrigation. So what is drip irrigation? Really it's just a simple tubing system. It really is just that. And at the end of these tubing systems are a bunch of little emitters. I actually have one here to show. So this is a drip emitter. There's several different types. This is the type that goes on a little post so it's slightly raised above the ground. And it has a very tube that connects to it and it has a very predictable drip rate. So this particular one right here will drip a half gallon for every hour that is running. And that drip rate is really important when we talk about designing our system, which we'll get into here in a minute, because we have to be able to make sure we're not over-watering our plants and that we're not under-watering them. And so the fact that drip irrigation allows us to have a very predictable rate of flow is what makes it very advantageous. The other side of it though is that it's a pretty cheap system. Most of the plastic parts that are part of this are the cost range of cents, not dollars. That little emitter was about 10 cents. Other emitters maybe around 30 cents. The tubing is usually a few cents a foot, so you can buy 100 feet of tubing for just a handful of dollars. It's not an expensive irrigation type of system. It's also very easy to do. And that kind of takes us into what are some of those benefits. The main one that gets pushed tends to be around water efficiency, however. When you have a sprinkler or you're watering with like a watering can or a hose, a lot of that water just sits on the surface and evaporates or runs away from the root system of your plants. And so you're not getting the water right where it needs to be. This little emitter, however, will just slowly drip and it keeps the ground around it moist. So there really isn't a lot of water waste. Water's not running away, water's not really evaporating. Just a few drips every few seconds as it kind of dribbles out of the end of it. So water efficiency is a big part of this. And water efficiency goes into savings. If you live in a metropolitan area, you're paying for your water. And so if you're having to water your plants, you add up pretty quickly to cost as well. So again, not just from a component perspective, you know that this is a cheap part. It's also cheap from an ongoing maintenance point of view of actually running this system. In general, from my personal experience of doing this, I didn't notice any difference in my water bill by having this on the entire summer than I did when I didn't have it on. It was very marginal in terms of a cost increase. But the other advantage is I'd say it's also very versatile. So when I started, I explained I had a container-based garden that was literally on my deck. So I was able to run the tubing to each one of my potted plants, have an emitter in each one of the potted plants, and keep it moist. Now that I have changed, though, to more of a bed-based garden, I can still use the same techniques that I use to do the individual pots for that larger bed. Actually, doing it in the bed is easier, but the purpose of it is exactly the same. And so it's very versatile. It's very easy to install. So here's an example of some of the tubing. So this is a half-inch. This is a half-inch nylon tubing. This is what your standard carrier tube would be. And we'll talk a little bit more about this when we get into the various components. But this is a very thin walled tube. So in terms of being able to install this, all you really need is a scissors. You don't need any expensive special tools. The various drip irrigation companies, though, have plenty of specialized tools that they would like to sell you, but you really don't need it. A scissor is more than good enough to be able to cut this. And the only tool to be able to punch a hole in this early, you could use just a nail. It's very, very simple. So getting into some of the basic components. So when we're thinking about designing one of these irrigation systems, we need to understand our water source. So for me, my initial water source was a hose bib, just a normal hose outlet on the outside of my home. So I needed to be able to understand where that is, how far away from it is from my plants. And we'll talk about that in a lot of detail when we get into the designing. But there's other ways of hooking this up. Today, the way my irrigation system works, is I had an existing in-ground irrigation for my lawn. I tap directly into that now for my water. So it's always on. There's a timer associated with it, though, to handle my cycles of the water, but I'm no longer connected to a hose bib. The other main component is a head assembly. And this is the most complicated part of your entire irrigation system, is your head assembly. And it's really not that complicated. We'll go through each of these parts here, but this is a very typical head assembly. So I'll break this down and talk about the individual components of it. Then you have the tubing. The tubing comes in a range of sizes. And we'll talk about how you decide what size is important. And then finally you have a number of fittings to connect the tubes, to do T-intersections, to get it to all of the places that you need to. And then, of course, you have the drip emitters and some other miscellaneous. As I already mentioned, though, your typical water source is different. And so with your hose bib, most of the reactors are already designed to fit a standard hose that you just literally screw it on. Unfortunately, though, your tubing is not a standard hose size. It isn't a standard hose at all. You have other connectors that help you basically bridge between this size hosing and your normal garden hose. But again, there's a number of ways of supplying water to it. Most of them are far outside the scope of what I'm going to talk to you tonight. I can tell you that for me personally, what I am switching to is a rain catchment system for feeding my garden. So it's completely off of the MSD type water system or whatever. I don't want the public water source for it. So I'm switching over to rain water. But that brings some challenges as well because it's not pressurized. And now you have to figure out how you're going to supply enough pressure to push the water through your hose. So breaking down the head assembly, the first thing you would typically see is your timer. And that's this top piece right here. There's a lot of different types of timers. This is a simple battery operated timer. It allows you to program a schedule into it for how frequently it will water on and how many times a day. This particular one can turn the water on and off four times in a 24 hour period. And you can also program different schedules for weekdays to the weekend and so forth. So it gives you a lot of flexibility to do a little bit. There's also an override switch on this particular one where I can hook this up to a rain detection system where if it recently rained it will override the timer and it won't turn on. But all of that is optional. You do not need this. In a very basic system, you can just hook it up and just turn it on periodically as you need water. I would suggest however you do have some sort of timer, it makes it much, much easier. Pretty slowly, that kind of half gallon an hour, maybe a gallon. One of these type of systems is turning on and off several times in a day and running for fairly long periods of time. The next piece in the head assembly, and this is not an optional component, this is your back flow preventer. So it prevents any inside of your irrigation system from back flowing into your home so you don't get any contamination into your water supply. Very simple little valve that basically just stops the water from flowing. The next piece that you would typically see is a filter. There's a lot of different types of filters. But why a filter is important is because the outlets on your emitters are very small and it's very, very simple to get them jammed and plugged with a little grain of sand or any sort of debris. So you really do require some sort of filter to be able to keep the water clean. Again, this is just a very, very simple filter. You do have to clean this periodically, but this particular one is designed to be able to take the filter out while the whole system is installed. A lot of the cheaper ones are in line and you literally have to disconnect everything to clean up the filter. And so as a kind of a tip, I would definitely go with something you can clean without having to disconnect your system. The next major piece that you will see is a pressure regulator. This is just another valve that has a spring inside of it. This will wear out over time. Just as a note, but it's also another fairly cheap piece. I think this is like $1.25 for one of these. Your irrigation system does require a pretty normalized pressure. Most drip irrigation wants between 15 pounds per square inch to 25 pounds per square inch. This particular one is a 25 PSI pressure regulator. Again, it just has a spring inside of it. Usually your home pressure is way higher than that. So we're actually lowering the pressure down, but we want to try to regulate it to keep it average. But this is exactly also why a typical rain catchment system that isn't pressurized would have problems being able to push it because it can't get the 25 pounds of pressure unless you had like a little makeshift water tower or something where you were raising it up in there to provide the pressure. And the last typical piece that you're going to see is the part that takes it from the hose connection and brings it down into your actual tubing for your system. And that's what this is, is it just converts it. There's one more piece that's optional that you will see as part of many head assemblies, and that's a fertilizer injector. And I do have a fertilizer injector, but I would warn that they're quite pricey. And when I say quite pricey, I think they range about $2 to $400 for a irrigation fertilizer injector. It also does require specialized fertilizer. It has to be a liquid fertilizer, again, because you can't use a water-soluble standard fertilizer with most of these screens. It'll clog it up. So that's just a quick note that if you're really, really lazy like I am, you would probably want to do some sort of fertilization injection as well as part of your system. So your plants are not just getting watered, but every single watering is giving them a minute amount of fertilizer at the same time. And again, from a liquid fertilizer point of view, it is available in organic forms, inorganic, and all of that sort of thing. So if you are interested in organic gardening, you can still use liquid fertilizer for it. I would also warn, though, that there's some very cheap fertilizer injectors on the market, and I have tried them, and they are very much not reliable in terms of how much fertilizer they inject into your system. And that can be very troublesome if you inject too much, and now you burn your plants and they're killing them. I just warn against them they're not worth it. You're better off having no fertilizer injector than growing another cheap one. So as mentioned, your next major component is the tubing. It's available in a poly or a vinyl. There really isn't any difference between the two in terms of performance. The main difference is the thickness of the wall. The vinyl is a little bit thicker than the poly. The poly tends to be thinner. The poly tends to be a little stiffer as well. So it's a little harder to maneuver around your garden than the vinyl is. The thing that's common to all of these irrigation systems is you have some sort of main line to deliver your water. And when we get into the designing part, we'll talk about why that is, but essentially you need a larger tube that goes into a bunch of smaller tubes. That's really what it means, and your main line tube is either going to be a half inch at minimum or up to a full inch if you have a very large supply of water that you're trying to do. The other side of it is the microtubing. That's typically what will go to the individual plants. If you're doing a bed, however, usually you would still use a main line tubing, just do it in a very long line and have emitters all the way along. In this picture up here, this is an example of the microtubing being stuck into the main line. So it's just a branch off of it essentially. And how you install this is there's a little barb fitting. You literally just pop a hole in it, push the barb into the tube, and it provides enough of a seal when it's pressurized that it won't leak. Which brings us to the fittings themselves. There is a lot of different fittings. It's Y fittings, T fittings, L fittings, every kind of fitting you can think of. The next thing I would mention here, there was the types. This is what's called a perma-lock fitting that I have right here. So basically what you do with this type of fitting is you would push your tubing onto the end of it. Just like that. And then you screw this down until it's tight. And that's what provides your seal. And so this is now sealed. It won't come off as long as this is tight. And it's reusable. So the other type is a compression fitting. Compression fittings are a little bit cheaper than the perma-locks. But the compression fitting is a once use. And like any plastic, even though this has UV protectant in it, it will eventually wear out in the sunlight. And you will need to replace this at some point. And so to me, the difference in cost for a compression fitting is not worth it. Because you end up having to replace all of your fittings as well as the tubing. So just going to keep that in mind. And then the last one is the barbed fitting. The barbed fitting that you really only see in the microtubing. And this is just an example of a barbed fitting right there. Essentially, this is a small little barbed end of the tube connector. And it pushes in, expands the tubing and essentially locks it. Very simple. So the watering devices, these are your emitters essentially. But there's a few different types of emitters. All of the emitters I have in my system are simple drip emitters like this. But there are micro sprinklers that literally will have a little pop-up and they sprinkle the water all over. There are various sprayers as well. There's also misters. And so it depends on the type of, you know, plants that you're growing. Some flowers prefer to have the water fall down on top of them. Others don't like to be touched by water. As an example, lettuce is okay with being wet. Tomatoes are not. So in general, though, this goes directly to the roots where the sprayers and the sprinklers end up in the air and there is more waste. They also require a lot more water and a lot more pressure to run as well. I guess the last one I would say is the drip tape. It's not really an emitter per se. It's really just a lighter version of this with holes already pre-insolved in it. The problem I have with most drip tape is it can really only be laying in a line. I cannot move it around the plants. It has to go in a straight line. It's also quite a bit thinner wall than this is. And so if you have pressure beyond about 15 pounds per square inch, you can actually burst your line. So it's not very durable either, but it's extremely cheap. It's pennies of foot and so you can get hundreds of feet of your thing for just a few dollars. So it is definitely an option. I don't personally think it's a very good option. So a few more things on the pressure, or on the dripper emitters themselves is they do come in a couple different types. This is what's called a pressure compensating dripper. The idea behind the pressure compensating is that your pressure in your tubing will vary as it goes up and down over your terrain. So if you have dips in your terrain the pressure is going to be heavier and the spikes up over here are going up and the pressure is less. And so a drip emitter that's like this is able to consistently drip at the same rate regardless of the pressure as long as it's within a range. So I mentioned earlier that it's about 15 pounds or 25 pounds is kind of an ideal range for these. So as long as it's within that range it will always drip consistently. The non compensating one will not end up with some very strange results of when you're using them they are cheaper than these but when I say cheaper instead of 10 cents it's like 8 cents. So it's really a big difference in cost. So the other miscellaneous components you would see are various stakes, various risers to hold the tubing. This tubing is fairly stiff it does not like to hold still it doesn't like to stay where you put it. So I definitely would suggest that you get some sort of stakes to keep it in place because as the sun hits this it will expand and it will move and it will do all sorts of things that you really don't want it to do so stake it down. So those are really the only other components though that are part of your system. As I did mention earlier though in terms of tools there are a number of specialized tools. If you're doing a lot of this it probably is worth buying one of those tools. The holes in here to put the micro tubing they also have specialized cutters and so forth but in general you literally can get away with a little nail and a scissors. So into designing your system I guess the first thing I'd warn intimidated by this all of this really truly is easy but it does require some math it does require some planning we need to work out how much water we are going to need for our plants and because of that we have to do some calculations but it is all very basic stuff so I would suggest if you are interested in sticking with it not getting too intimidated. So what do we actually need to know? The main thing this will turn is we need to know where our water source is all of this tubing has a certain capacity we will talk about it in the next slide but it is very important to know where we are going from and where we are going to so we really have to identify where our water source is and at distance to our garden we then need to know how much water our plants actually need this is where it gets a little complicated because we have to deal with things like well what if it is raining what if the temperature difference in things like water our plants require I do have some charts in here that we can go through to help with that also need to understand the number of plants we are actually going to use so each one of the emitters you have is taking a little bit of water out of the tube so if I have a small microtubing I can add max supply 30 gallons of water down that tube so if I have one gallon an hour emitters 30 of them before I am out of capacity and then I have no more water so it is just part of your planning you need to understand how many plants I am going to run to and then you also do need to understand a little bit about your soil type so in terms of the water source considerations the main thing that you want to be aware of is if you are using a hose bib and I am installing this head assembly to it I don't really have enough room to install my hose assembly to here when I first did my planning and I purchased all my little parts and was very excited to go to install it just to find out that I was about six inches short before I hit the ground so I ended up having to make some modifications to make all of this work but that is the main thing I would say that you have to be considerate of this because you actually have enough space to have all these little pieces and all the parts hanging underneath your hose bib I would say that actually most standard hose bibs do not have enough room to install this and so what you do in that case is well get creative I essentially created a little piece that came down with PVC piping that was connected and made it go right back up so it is now taller on the other side though that is our garden hose spot too so again consider using some sort of Y adapter or something like that just to keep that in mind so how much water do you need this is literally in my opinion the most difficult part to figure out if you have a standard garden it is not so bad because we can do it just based on kind of the square footage of the garden but in my case where I had all of these pots that I was trying to supply water to each one of them has a different plant and it requires a different amount of water and so there was a lot of calculation that went into it to figure out how long can I actually run this with a half gallon emitter and this one five half gallon emitters and this other one so it would balance out and they would all get an equal amount of water it really was kind of a pain to figure all of that out but again it is fairly simple to understand basically your vegetables need one to two inches a week that does vary by plant type some plants are more water hungry than others some are also less tolerant of over watering than others definitely suggest you spend a little time researching your plants for the most part they're all in that range temperature though does make a difference and we'll talk about that in a chart here in a minute so in order to figure it out though we have to understand what is our actual flow rate in one of these tubes how much water can we get through and we'll talk about that when we get to the tubing but we also then need to understand when you're talking about inches every one of these components is measured in gallons per hour so how do I go from gallons per hour to inches of rainfall and I guess the important part here is to understand that when they're talking about inches of rainfall you're essentially talking about a cubic inch and so then when we're talking about a cubic inch we're talking about how that will spread out over a piece of ground and so if we can calculate the volume of soil we can figure out how many cubic inches do we need to be able to cover that with water and again we'll go in and do some math here in a second but essentially one of water one cubic inch cubic inches so let's do some math so if we take some basic let's say we have a one cubic foot root ball which is rather small by the way but we'll just use this to keep the math simple and we require two inches of water a week and we have a half gallon emitter just like this one how much water do we need to do really what we're trying to figure out is what is the duration of the day in order to get the right volume of water so one cubic foot is 144 cubic inches two cubic inches of water is 288 cubic inches so we just divide that and now we know we need 1.25 gallons that's how much water we need every week in order to supply this plant with that desired two inches of water so we take that we divide it out by our emitter five hours or 150 minutes a week that this needs to be running we can divide that by our number of days in the week and so forth what you can find out here though is that in many cases when you have a plant having a single emitter is just not enough you might need two or three of these emitters to be able to get it down to a time period that is reasonable so for my garden for instance I'm running my timer four times a day for about two and a half minutes for each run so it's a very short period of time just comes on a few times a day and runs at I don't have any periods of time for 21 minutes half hour or anything like that it's usually short durations that does though depend a little bit on your soil type which we'll talk about so the things to keep in mind if we are talking about that average or even a raised bed we don't need to have exact per plant calculations we can average it out for the entire bed we're just going to figure out what the volume of soil is in my plant bed, my garden bed or figure out what is the volume of soil in a typical row of crops in my garden as I mentioned though if you're using a container garden like I was you have a lot more math to do you also need more than one emitter and also make sure to factor in your average rainfall so plants need two inches of rain a week and I just received an inch well I need to factor that into my schedule because if I go ahead and add another two inches to that in that week I am now over watering and again depending on the plants they might not be tolerant to that some plants might be completely okay and the plants I have are alright with that so I usually ignore the rainfall because I am within my range that's appropriate but that isn't always the case amounts does vary this is a pretty standard gardening chart that you will find you just search online for watering needs by temperature when they typically say that vegetable gardens need an inch that is an average temperature of 60 degrees in the week so when we say average temperature here it's literally just taking the high plus the low divided by two so our average temperature in the summer is not 60 degrees here in Missouri, here in St. Louis so we need quite a bit more water than that so as you can see as our temperature goes up our water needs also go up so you do need to keep that in mind with this system so in the springtime you may be perfectly okay with running an inch a week in the middle of summer and again basics what that actually equals in terms of gallons for a school soil does matter though for me all of my soil is completely tailored what I had in my pots and now what I have in my raised bed so I have an ideal soil situation so I don't have to worry about soil type at all I don't have to average it out but the things to keep in mind if you have very sandy soil it rains very very and so you're going to want your drippers closer together because the water won't get a chance to spread out it basically goes straight down in your soil and if you have clay in dry soil it's going to do the exact opposite it's going to spread out and take quite a bit of time to actually sink in I think I have the next chart that tells us a little bit about that but how much in order to get down 6 inches of depth inside of a clay base soil you need between 8 and 10 inches of rainfall to actually seep that far down in dry soil so you need quite a bit more water than you do for the depth and you can see in the sand we don't even need 6 inches of water to be able to sink down that far because it just starts running straight down so again these are some of the things that you need to understand when you're designing this is what is my soil like for a typical garden we're trying to get this kind of loamy type of soil where we're somewhere in the middle where we have good drainage but we also have good water retention and that's what's ideal is another thing to understand though is how deep is the root systems for our plants and this is just a chart that shows some common vegetables so if you look at something like a tomato plant a mature tomato plant can literally have its feeder roots down up to 4 feet into the soil they dig very far in search of water and so that's again keep in mind when you're watering this is make sure that you are getting the depth for your volume when you're calculating volume not just there you can't just expect that you need to have it moist down a foot you might need it moist down several feet the next thing that you're going to want to consider is the timing of when are you going to run your water how frequently you're going to run your water and so on so I mentioned that I personally run mine 4 times a day that is more just to kind of balance it out I do not run it in the dead of the day though I don't try to go at the hottest point of the day because I do want to try to avoid evaporation so I'm usually doing it in the morning early evening and I do it very late evening and also once in the middle of the night is how my personal schedule is going to set up but typically though morning is the best time to water so tube capacity so I already alluded to this a little bit but these tubes do have a fixed volume they can only have so much water flowing through them and so I mentioned with the micro tubing you do have a limitation of 30 gallons per hour that also from a pressure point of view you can have a maximum run of 30 feet before it loses its pressure that is actually much easier to break than you would think most of my beds are only about 10 feet long but after I have all the little side runs to each individual plant I easily am past the 30 foot mark and so for my beds I'm not even able to use the micro tubing I have to use more of a tube like this to carry my water but this is also where I said it's important to understand where your water source is it's a few hundred feet away from your house while we're going to make sure we need to have a higher capacity main line to carry the water out there so you may very well need to go with a 3 quarter inch tubing instead as the tubing gets bigger it does get more expensive and it's not a wildly expensive thing no matter what you're doing but it does get up there in price as you start getting into bigger tubes usually when you're talking about the one inch tubes that is typically what you would see in commercial irrigation most of the consumer irrigation sources don't even sell the one inch tubing but it is available if you have a need so this is kind of reiterating what I've already said but really the maximum run length why that's important is because we want to keep a consistent pressure all the way across in our tubing and once we breach that maximum length our pressure starts to drop pretty rapidly and then obviously the maximum gallons per hour we just need to make sure that we have enough water to feed every one of the emitters we have nothing too magical about that so how do you get started well I think the easiest way to get started is to grab a piece of paper and literally draw out your plan draw where your house is draw where your garden is note down how many feet it is note how many bends you have so you can understand how many little connectors you're going to need to have to make this work again this stuff is not all that flexible if I bend it it kinks so if I want to go around a corner I need a connector to go around that corner so you need to understand where all of your corners are where every place you're going to have to tee off of this any of those type of things and in my opinion the easiest way of doing that is just to draw it out make it very simple and then you can turn that drawing essentially into your parts inventory so you know what to buy and price it out very easily as well so it looks basically something like this you have all of your beds laid out and this is a case this case is a raised bed type garden so literally we have a main line that goes to each one of the beds that main line has a single line that goes on the side and then we have our drip emitters going down these feeder lines a very simple system something like that shouldn't take more than even a few minutes to lay out design again if you're doing more of a container based it is definitely more complicated but for gardens for raised beds this is extremely simple so some tips and tricks one this will come coiled up and as I mentioned it's stiff if you want to work with it let it sit out in the sun a little bit it becomes soft and pliable you can now straighten it out and get it mostly straight but as I also mentioned you're going to want to clip it down and hold it down because as the sun hits it it's going to want to bend back and do things like that at the same time though it is much much easier to punch this when it's cold so put your holes in it before you let it heat up in the sun or do it early in the morning or something like that when you're actually going to put the punched holes in this warm trying to punch holes in it is not a fun task it just will bend yep well I'd actually probably just use some ice water as opposed to an ice cube but yeah you can definitely cool it off and that's actually one of the tips here for tubing microtubing can be a little bit hard to get on those barbed ends but if you just take a cup of warm water or hot water dip it in there for 10 seconds it's now pliable it will go right on there's no reason to try to force it on these things and give yourself a headache it's very easy just put a little bit of warm water and another I think really important thing is do not over tighten these connectors they're all plastic I have yet to see anyone that really makes these in any sort of metal components or anything so if you over tighten them it's very easy to wreck it so do not over tighten you seal quite well you just have to have it finger tight and that's enough to keep it from dripping so there's no need to tighten it down to the point where it wrecks the thing the other thing I would definitely highly suggest is when we go if I go back here actually and we look at this bed you potentially have multiple beds that are feeding off of this and multiple lines if I was designing this system I would definitely install some valves in here so I can do some maintenance every now and then so I can turn off the water here and not have to worry about it still feeding this garden so that's another thing just to keep in mind from a tip is consider installing valves wherever you think that it would fit so you can turn off the water source very easily so what resources do you need to get started there's a number of companies that sell this stuff this is one that I've used it's drip works I think I actually probably purchased most of the stuff from drip depot these companies that specialize in it definitely have the best prices they do tend to sell some of these things in bulk though you usually can't buy one of these 10 cents emitters one at a time you usually have to buy like a pack of 10 or a pack of 20 of them but if you're doing a garden chances are you're buying 20 of them anyways that said though Home Depot and Lowe's carries all of these components they have them usually in their plumbing section I don't know why it's there and not in their gardening section but that's where they are is in the plumbing area I would say though my experience with what you can get at Lowe's and Home Depot is it tends to be not nearly as good quality as the stuff you're buying from these specialized dealers most of the stuff that you're buying from these dealers is also made in the USA it's not Chinese type parts I don't know that that really makes a big difference on these because they're all pretty cheap anyhow but they are mostly made in America where a lot of the Home Depot and Lowe's stuff is cheap Chinese plastic the last thing I suggest is when you're looking for more plant information University of Missouri extension they have a lot of information on their website probably one of the most atrocious websites I've had to try to navigate and find things but it does have a lot of really really good information that's very specific to our area in terms of watering schedules in terms of what the plants actually need for care here in St. Louis area so it's definitely worth looking there and also if you're really really interested they have a master gardener program so you can learn to be a master gardener well thank you absolutely