Ideas wanted for watering a dry bed directly from a shed downpipe

[Storming Norman]

Hi All,

Possibly not the main topic but I'm thinking about an issue I had this year and wondered if you had any suggestions.

I have a bed by a fence that grows well but it gets very dry during the summer because of the neighbours bushes and trees behind the fence. Across a patch from this I have a shed and a smaller bore downpipe that runs down to the ground to a gravel path behind the shed - along the fence. Water being wasted!

There is no room for a water butt - I'd need a big one anyway to take a shed's worth of water - so how can I run off the water straight from the down pipe across this bed evenly [and maybe on to the next bed?]. I'd need a widish bore pipe connection that would stay on and then linking to a water dispersal system like a very leaky hose. This can sit across the path as it's not often walked on.

Has anyone done something like this that I can copy?

[taff]

sounds like you need a seep hose or something similar.
I haven't done it, but if you get the connections, and the hose, you can 'fan' it out across the bed. Put an on/off tap on the bottom or halfway up the pipe in case of torrential downpour, you dont want to be adding that to the bed if it's raining on top of it for hours for example.
or you can tie in the water pipe to the fence at a couple of feet level, and either use individual hoses comeing off the main one, again with the seep hose.

[chris]

I'd have said seep hose, or if you want to control it more finely, a dripper system (hozelock do one). You'd need to either use a compression fixing, or bodge a similar type setup to get it to connect up to a downpipe though.. I can't think of any other way than going from downpipe -> greenhouse sized guttering pipe -> mdpe (or similar) connections -> a convertor (20mm i guess?) -> seep hose