Splitting Garden Beds into 2 Zones

2 Zones - 16 Beds

This is an example of how to zone off beds. 

Each bed uses 4 rows of DET Tubing for full coverage of the 4' wide beds. Calculating the water usage of the beds helps to separate the beds into zones to ensure that enough water flow is available to water the different clusters of beds.

Let's take a look at the top clusters of beds in the orange zone. If each bed is 12' long then that means the 6" spacing DET Tubing has 2 emitters per foot. Therefore, 24 emitters over the 12ft of tubing. 24 emitters x .5GPH = 12 GPH needed per length of DET Tubing. 12GPH x 4 rows per bed = 48GPH per bed. 4 beds in the cluster = 192 GPH. With room left in the capacity of the zone, let's look at nearby beds to add to this zone. The beds to the right (in the middle of the garden plan) have 80GPH total, using the same math principles we used in the first part. 192 + 80 is about 280 GPH.

The other zone will need about 390 GPH. Using a 3/4" supply line will ensure that there is enough water available for these zones. 3/4" can handle upwards of 400 GPH so both zones are satisfied (as long as they are isolated into their own separate zone that will run independently). If you chose to use 1/2" tubing you'd need to split this system into 4 zones since both current zones exceed the maxmimum water capacity of 1/2" tubing.