In this video, we are sharing the process of lining our garden beds, create drainage holes, and setting up irrigation using poly tubing and spaghetti lines. Follow along as we explain our planting strategy and discuss plans for improving ventilation and temperature control. Follow our informative journey towards a super productive greenhouse!
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Dome Greenhouse Overview
2:26 Setting Up Irrigation System
9:01 Next Step
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Lindsey:
Hello everyone, it’s Lindsay. I’m here at Lynette’s Bug Out Property. We are in the 25 foot dome, which is the smallest of the greenhouse domes that we built here on the property. I’m really excited today because we are going to be filling and prepping our beds. So is this gonna be a little bit of a process? We have our beds all lined and the outsides are complete. We’re gonna be finishing them with some nice wood and painting them so that they last longer. But the lining is in the next steps, we’re gonna drill drainage holes so any excess water can escape. And then we’re also going to be drilling holes to plump through for our irrigation. So we’ll be setting up the very basics of our irrigation, but as of now, we don’t have main water lines coming to the greenhouse. So this will be mostly prep work because we wanna get that done before we fill the bed with soil. Otherwise, it’s just a lot more difficult to put our tubing and our lines in and everything like that. So we’re gonna show that process. And then we’re gonna be filling our garden beds up with soil. We have a couple different kinds that are gonna help us get the composition of our raised beds just right. And then we’re also going to be doing a little bit of planting today. So our very first planting in our greenhouse domes, which is really exciting.
So this is one of the initial steps just to starting to get a little bit of productivity. And it’ll also help us when we see plants in here, know how we have to change the environment. So right now it is really hot in here. We don’t have our ventilation system set up. We’re gonna be adding vents to our greenhouse as well as a swamp cooler, which will help us change the temperature in here and have a little bit more control. But for right now, the breeze is all the cooling effect we have. But this is creating quite a nice heating zone, which is awesome, definitely what we want for the winter. But for the summer it’s gonna get a little too toasty for our plants. But by having plants in now, we’ll be able to kind of see how they’re doing and that’ll give us a good reference point going forward. So always good to experiment a little. This whole thing has definitely been a really big experiment, but we’re very excited with the progress so far and we hope you continue to join us on our journey of getting these greenhouses super productive.
So to set up the irrigation, we are going to be using our poly tubing to come through the bottoms of the bed. Then I’m going to cap the poly tube and then have a spaghetti line coming off. Because these beds are in such the pretty small little compartments, we don’t really want to do a really expansive system. So just having polytube and punching holes for our spaghetti line will be a really efficient way to do this. And it’s also just a lot easier. It’s easier to fix. And then that’ll mean we won’t have to, we’ll just have to drill once through the bottom and then connect the poly tubes underneath rather than drilling through the sides of our beds. So I’m just going to be cutting the poly tube into about how tall is this? Like four feet, three and a half, four feet sections. So we just have enough to work with on the bottom. We’re probably not gonna do that today until we for sure know how we’re going to be getting our main water line in here. But for now, we’ll do that section and we’ll have that in before we put soil into the beds. Okay. So now that I have my piece of poly tube cut, I’m just gonna kind of check. So I just wanna make sure there’s enough to stick up and enough to work with. On the bottom, I’m going to put an end cap on, which is one of these pieces. That one is perfectly snug. Awesome. Beautiful. Okay. But that one will be living right there. Perfect. So probably gonna have to go in through the back on this one as well. Going all the way down. See the poly fabric without punching the hole in it like a dummy. And that way we can filet it back and secure it with staples and drop our grate over top of it. Perfect.
Chandler:
All right, we are here on our last box installing both drainage holes as well as an irrigation inlet. I went ahead and drilled through our plywood with a nice step bit here, thankfully didn’t blow out. Have a nice snug fit. So we have already installed one of these. It’s basically just this blue pipe here, snugly fit, and then there’s some silicon waterproofing applied around there, splayed out attached with some staples. And just to be safe so we’re not losing a bunch of our soil, we went ahead and put this mesh material right over there. You’ll have a chance to see that whole process again in the back. Only got through one, however. Wow, that’s actually quite perfect. Very nice. Good fit. So we’re going to leave the cap right here at about soil level. We’re going to refinish around the sides of this box with some nice trim and whatnot, but I will simply apply some caulking.
Lindsey:
And we’re doing this so that it’s easy to access if we need to fix something with the cap or if we need to redo this line. It’s easy enough to access, but we also want it hidden because we don’t really need to see those. We just need daily, you know, we just need to see that the sprinklers are turning on and that our plants are getting the water they need.
Chandler:
We’re just trying to have a beautiful view of the fruits of our labor and leave that
Lindsey:
As hidden as we can.
Chandler:
Absolutely.
Lindsey:
So that is the irrigation inlet. And then we’re gonna have spaghetti lines coming out of it. We’re probably only gonna need one or two. So I’m gonna poke two holes in this line. And then if we need to cap one in the future, we can. It’s always easier to make maybe one or two more than you think you might need, and then you can always cap them off and you have it as an alternative in the future. But now Chandler’s gonna show us how we put in the drainage hole.
Chandler:
Sure you’re all very eager to see this process. <Laugh>, here we are. Miss Lindsae was nice enough to precut these for me, so I can just jump right in, snug it up, go back to our handy dandy silicone, and for sure less is more. With this stuff, our poor staple gun is completely covered, as am I, but it does an excellent job of providing a nice waterproof seal. All right. And very carefully, without stabbing yourself, we’re gonna just fold this over and decrease the diameter of any openings ideally. Here we go. One more for good luck and voila. Awesome. So now our drainage holes and our irrigation inlets are done for all of the beds in this section of the greenhouse. So we’re gonna get to the next step.
Lindsey:
So the next step, now that we have our irrigation inlet, we have our line that is capped off and we put these connectors in. And now I just have some spaghetti lines. So this is just solid spaghetti line with an irrigation sprinkler attached. We’re gonna start out using these sprinkler heads. I feel like they’re just the easiest, most functional thing to get the most coverage throughout the bed. They’re easy to replace and they’re not really prone to that much dysfunction besides maybe a head coming off every now and again. So they’re pretty easy to use. I also brought up some sprinkler line, which is like this spaghetti line, but it has holes in it. And that is you just would put it around the plant or around the bed, and that just makes the surrounding area around where the line is wet. But that can be a little bit harder to mess with and get just right. So for the function of us just starting and kind of experimenting, we’re just going to do this and then see how it goes. We can always change it out. Important to at least have an idea of what’s gonna work best. And like I said before, like we don’t have main water hooked up yet, so we’re just doing this because this will make it easier to have this all set up once the soil’s in. We’re just gonna want to do this now rather than later. But that’s the basic idea. I’m putting two heads in each of these bed sections. I don’t think we’ll really need two heads, but it kind of just allows us to have the option if we do need it. So we’re gonna go forward and do this with the rest of the beds, and then we’ll have all of our irrigation set up that we need to before we put the soil in the beds.
