Auto-watering a 12'x8', advice please.

[Peter]

Looking ahead to next year, this years experience has decided me on getting some sort of automatic watering system, but what is best?

My 12'x8' has large soil beds, a 12'x2' aluminium channel bench cantilevered off the frame uprights down one side. It has two, soon to be four, automaticaly controlled roof vents and two manually controlled louvres (one side only).
I grow toms, peppers etc in the beds and have growbags on the concrete floor, I use the bench for sowing seeds, raising seedlings and for some house plants to get a good dose of sunlight.
I intend fitting both mains electricity (professionally done) and mains water to the house, as well as having a decent sized propagator, Sankey 300?

So what can I fit, that does not cost the earth that can gently water my seeds and seedlings as needed, yet be able to soak my beds as needed?

Also any advice on a compatible propagator/

[nick the grief]

Hi Peter,

Automatic watering of seedlings is a tricky business as you can imagine. You need to get into the realms of leaf switches & misters - Two Wests sell all the kit but it's expensive and for what you will use it for I don't think that it will be worth the cost - or hard to justify if your a tight git like me

As to propagators, a lot of them don't have a thermostat on them as such, they just raise the temp 4 or 5c above the ambient which is OK unless you get weather like we had in April. What I've got is a Bench built across the end of the G/house ( about 8ft x 2ft) and it has a wooden Box on top, lined with Polythene and about 3" of sand in it with a150w soil warming cable in it and a thermostat I can get about 17 full size seed trays on this at any one time and I have a shelf about 2ft above it wher I can move things to to wean them off heat as it sits about 2 or 3c higher then the other end of the g/house.

The Bench was built using fence posts (3" x 3") and there's 8 of them to spread the weight, the bottom is 8"x 1" planking and the sides are the same to allow a bit of over lap and there's about 3cwt of sand in it so it doesn't move

I've used this for all sorts of things from rooting cuttings, sowing Cacti seedlings and rooting a pineapple top so i'd gop for this layout without hessitation (or repetition - sorry Radio 4 joke)

PS - I'll take some foto's of mine tonight and post them for you

Hope this helps