Being a gardener in Southern California certainly comes with a tremendous advantages: year-round growing season; a climate conducive to almost every single edible plant with the exception of very high chill or tropical varieties; fewer plant-borne diseases.

Of course, there are a couple of downsides, the largest of which is the lack of regular rainfall.

It is not unusual to go from April until December without any significant precipitation of any kind at all. For those of you who aren’t familiar with these conditions, that is a long, long time in the veggie garden.

And to make this especially deadly, I am a horrible procrastinator. Of course the vegetables I try to grow don’t care about my procrastination issues. They care about one thing only: a steady supply of water. And I wasn’t steady. So there have been issues…

This Fall, I decided that enough was enough. I would not plant anything or have anything to do with the garden until the watering issue was solved. After plenty of vacillating, I went with a microsprinkler setup. I had much earlier installed a sprinkler head in each veggie bed in the front so that was easy, but I was shocked to learn how badly many of the drip system connectors are made. After watching a few completely fall apart, I finally settled on a very solid multi-head outlet.  After this it was relatively easy to set up with the microsprinklers and the lines.  So Far so good.

My preference would typically be to have used soaker hoses, because there are many fewer parts, but I simply could not find any soaker hoses in all the usual places (Home Depot, Lowes, Etc.)  So I went this route and we will see how it goes.  The advantage to this method is that I can set the timer to give a little spritz every day to keep the topsoil moist for lettuces and other greens as well as give it a weekly or bi-weekly soak.