For me there is a difference between a yard and a garden. I had a yard at the apartment house I lived at before I moved to my current place. I never planted one single thing, even though I had permission and packets of flower seeds and good physical conditions. I noticed that my yard here at my new place became my garden when I started thinking about how I would change it... how I could bring out the grace of the forsythia by cutting some branches... how the privacy of the backyard could be enhanced by extending some already established lines just a bit further, so as to work with the circulation of sight and of perambulation... It became my garden instead of my yard whenever I thought about the spirit of the trees and plants instead of their utility. I plan to plant a cedar in order to block the view from a neighboring apartment house through my patio door, but that is for utility, and if that were the only change I ever thought about making, this would still be a yard. But in the process of choosing that particular tree, I learned that in nature, cedars grow right along with black walnuts, as they will do here, so it seems like introducing two new friends to each other in my backyard -- "Walnut, meet Cedar, just moved in from the clan farmstead. Cedar, meet Walnut, established and respected in this neighborhood for years." They nod and shake roots and become friends. This yard is becoming my garden as I meet and collaborate with the spirits here to make a place where we all feel good about spending time with each other.

The worst think about Dramm products is finding a local vendor. You are almost required to buy online. Here is a new one from them...I believe the cost is $25 65 Touch'N Flow PROTM Valve Here is a list of other popular Dramm products (if you can find them). I like the pictures but not the prices. You can find rain nozzles at various places for a lot less than $30. But the valve itself is much more important to having a fun experience in the garden. If you don't mind buying new ones every year, or you don't mind getting soaked when you use them, then buy cheap ones. But I can just about promise that not getting wet is a lot more fun. And having a good, flat, male hose end along with an O-ring washer will solve most of your leakage issues. While looking for the picture of the Dramm thumb valve I showed above, I saw a price of $13. I paid $18 several years ago for mine plus $0.55 for the O-ring. They were worth every penny.

Fluid mechanics is more complicated than it might seem. goren is mixed up somewhere. Look at it this way: If you used 1/4-inch plastic tubing at 150 feet, you would have no flow at the end. If you had a pipeline that was 6 feet in diameter, you would have all the flow you needed at 150 feet. Bigger pipe results in more flow. Pressure was the wrong word to use. My bad. Flow is what you're after. In fluid mechanics of pipeline flow you have three elements that affect the flow. There is resistance, capacitance, and inertance. Goren was thinking about resistance I think. Generally you get more resistance to flow by pinching off the flow with a nozzle. You have less resistance to flow if you widen the pipe. Resistance is one factor. Capacitance has to do with the size of the pipe and that ability of that pipe to expand under pressure. Metal pipe has more ability to hold pressure than a rubber balloon. Plastic hose and pipe is somewhere in between. Pipe is probably better at holding the pressure. When you make the pipe bigger it can expand more. When you turn the water on, the larger pipe will help you maintain pressure along the length of a very long pipe. The other element is inertance. That has to do with the ability of an "object" at rest to get moving. If water is at rest in the hose, it will take a bit of time to get moving again. Once it does it flows fine with only the pipe resistance to slow it down. What really affects the fluid drag is the velocity of the flow. In the drag equation, the velocity factor is squared while the rest are linearly proportional to drag. Thus if you had flow moving at 3 feet per second, the drag would be 9x higher if you doubled the flow velocity. By increasing the diameter of the pipe, you drastically reduce the velocity of flow assuming you have a fixed mass of water moving through it. Your water flow is determined by the pressure and faucet size at one end, nozzle size at the other end (your sprinkler is the nozzle), the length of pipe, and the material/size of the pipe. When you go from 3/4 inch hose which has a cross sectional area of 0.44 inches, to a 2-inch pipe, which has a cross sectional area of 3.14 inches, the flow velocity drops by a factor of 6. Thus the resistance to flow drops by a factor of 36. To summarize if you have a large, rigid pipe full of slow moving water, you are going to have all the flow you need. 2 inches might not be big enough for some applications but it should be fine if you are only out to 1,000 feet or so. As an aside I used to work in a farming area with pivot irrigation systems. Some of those systems use electric pumps but some still rely on gasoline motors. What they do is connect the drive shafts of two V8 engines and use those to drive the water pumps. I figure they get 400-600 horsepower the way they are set up. Here's a picture.

I didn't think it would be a good idea, like you said, to run it under or over the sidewalk, bad enough to run a hose across it for the soaker hose my neighbor loaned me last year and this. But it's so long, it has 3 turns and having to lift it in and out to hoe (I will mulch when I get to it), is almost more than I can bear. It's heavy and drags across plants to move so last year I never weeded except a few by hand, but with tomatoes in cages, it wasn't too bad. The soaker worked great for tomatoes in neat rows but is not going to work well for tiny plants and roses scattered more randomly. My roses are one long row but the companion plants are scattered. Do you know what I really wish? I wish I had an old-fashioned pump and a cistern to collect all this water. That is not feasible but it would sure bring back memories, and I would love doing it. My grandmother couldn't have watered much of anything except her African violets inside, and things grew ok for her. She didn't mulch either, just probably did a little hoeing and had boards to walk on to get down the rows of what she had planted. She had a long perennial bed with shrubs and spring bulbs but no roses that I can remember. If I get fed up enough this summer and depending on my health, I can have a guy come and install a faucet on the other side of the back sidewalk (front is a 'nuther animal but could have another one in the basement going through another outside wall on the other side of the sidewalk). Then I could irrigate all of it. I will remember Drip Works, usually think long and hard before making such a change especially in light of expensive repairs I need done, can afford some of it but not all at once and hard to prioritize. Irrigation would not be that expensive if I do it myself but takes thinking, planning and time. I really really want my arbor put back up, right this time, heard a jackhammer going at the neighbor's, was hoping they could come here when done and blast out four concrete footings so we can start over. No such luck. Of course I would have paid a reasonable amount. It was a fence company and I saw they had augurs of different sizes in the truck. That would be so nice, that arbor was a dream come true, and it's all come to nothing for now, my son and the neighbor down the street think vandals knocked it over but it wasn't installed right, I knew it, and was frantically trying to find out how I could anchor it better, didn't make it in time, actually paid another guy to try to screw it in the footings using a masonry drill. That failed, too. My son is good at things but so busy. It is thundering and raining again . . .so far just a shower. The beds that aren't mulched yet dried out already after that record downpour, probably damp deeper down. I will mulch but want all my seedlings in and big enough so I can see where to put it all without ruining some plus I want to hoe first. I can neaten up the edges later.