Good watering is all-important to a good garden, and long, slow watering has many benefits.
A soaker hose might seem like the ideal way to accomplish this watering. You lay the porous rubber hose on top of the ground or bury it a few inches, turn on the faucet and let water weep out.
But much can happen 'twixt your faucet and the ground.
Soaker hoses are easy to use but their actual ooze rate is variable. It can differ significantly from the stated rate, and it can drop dramatically after the hose has been buried in the ground even one season.
Is your garden hilly? If it is, lower areas are going to get more water than higher ones. Even on flat ground, plants near the beginning of the line are going to get more water than plants near the end. Then there are leaks.
A P.C. emitter is plugged into a plastic irrigation tube. Emitters are useful for slow-watering widely spaced plants.
Rubber hoses are, admittedly, an improvement over those old-time canvas soaker hoses, which you couldn't snake around plants and which were even more variable in output.
A good alternative to soaker hoses is drip irrigation, which delivers water out to your garden with tubes that have drip holes, or emitters, spaced along their length. The system can sit on the ground or be buried below.
In this case, the emitters where water exits are engineering marvels that maintain relatively consistent water output in spite of changes in water pressure or elevation.
They also are engineered to avoid problems with clogging or with roots growing into the tubes. The whole system works at low pressure, putting little strain on wells and allowing the use of inexpensive tubing and fittings to bring water out to the garden.
Drip irrigation tubes and soaker hoses both have advantages over sprinklers for watering the garden. They both conserve water because little water is lost to evaporation and the slow output more closely matches plant use.
Both systems are easily automated with an inexpensive timer. Automation is a good idea because this type of watering works best when the water goes on and off frequently through the days and weeks. After all, plants absorb water throughout most days.
The cost of a system depends on a number of things, such as size of garden and whether you want top-of-the-line components. The cheapest way is to hook up just a soaker hose, which would probably run less than $50 (without automation) for a typical garden. A basic drip-irrigation system might cost up to $100.
including a timer - but drip irrigation with a timer makes the most efficient use of water.
Tubes for either type of system can be laid on top of the ground or buried. Besides shielding out the ultraviolet rays from the sun that can eventually damage plastics, burying hoses puts them out of reach of hoes and rototillers.
Some gardeners report that rodents chew on hoses laid on the surface of the soil. Others contend that rodents chew on buried hoses. (Are we talking about the same rodents?)
The best reason to keep these slow-watering devices on top of the ground is so that you can easily and periodically check that everything's drip, drip, dripping.