Installing Garden Soaker Hoses To Water Your Vegetable Plants

Overlay text "Less Work, More Food" pointing to a soaker hose

Do you want to grow food with almost zero effort?

Doing away with manual watering and installing a soaker hose in your garden beds is probably the biggest step you can take towards achieving that goal.

In this post, I’ll explain how to install a soaker hose across multiple garden beds, why using a soaker hose produces healthier plants and higher yields than watering manually or using a sprinkler, and why I prefer using soaker hoses to drip hoses.

Soaker hoses are just like regular hoses except that they are made of a porous material. Light water pressure is enough to encourage water droplets to form and trickle down the outside of the hose or onto anything they come into contact with. If you bury the hose underground, then there is a contact point with the soil along the length of the entire hose exactly where you want water delivered – next to the roots.

So a soaker hose can not only directly water the plant roots, but it requires less water to do so as surface evaporation losses are much much lower than with a sprinkler or any kind of surface watering.

Close up of a soaker hose spool with water droplets dripping out of its pores
Soaker hoses essentially ‘sweat’ water out of their pores and the water drips along the length of the hose before being soaked up by the soil and then permeating across the garden bed.

However, it also means the area watered is much smaller than with a regular sprinkler. The water needs to permeate through the soil rather than getting sprayed everywhere, so to get adequate water to your plants, the manufacturer recommends leave a separation of only a couple of feet between the plants and the soaker hose (Amazon*).

Hozelock Pourous Soaker Hose (Amazon)

To achieve this, you could plan out your planting layout and then try keep the distances between your plants and your hose as small as possible or you could wind the hose around some already established plants.

Diagram of the maximum soaker hose spacing (40cm max distance)
Hozelock recommend that you place their soaker hose within 40cm (16 inches) of your plants.

If you’re just planning on watering a row of tomatoes, then you can place that hose in a straight line next to the plant stems. But if you’re growing as much as possible and very tightly packing in your plants, then you might want to consider more wavy patterns to get good even coverage of the entire bed.

Once you’ve laid out your hose you can peg it in place and cover it with a couple of inches of compost. Which means these hoses are really easy to install in a no-dig bed where you’ve already got a couple of inches of loose soil to play with. Alternatively, you can dig a trench and bury the hose in the ground or simply peg it to the soil surface.

Soaker hose laid out in a wavy pattern on a garden bed
You can choose pretty much any layout you like when placing your soaker hose. Just make sure that the hose is close enough to the plants for the water to permeate through the soil. 40cm is the maximum recommended distance.

These soaker hoses come in set lengths, so once you’ve laid down your hose and fixed it in place, you might find you need to trim away the excess. They are really easy to cut using a pair of scissors or wire cutters and then you can connect an appropriate adapter to the end of the hose.

If you want this to be the end of your line, then you’re going to need an adapter that stops the flow of water to maintain water pressure. For instance, you could use a Hozelock ‘Aquastop’ connector (Amazon*) which only allows water to flow when you’ve got something connected. If you have multiple beds, you can use a pair of female-female adapters to connect a regular non-porous hose and carry the water over to the next bed without wasting any water.

Hozelock Aquastop Connector (Amazon)

Be aware that there is a limit to how long a soaker hose can be before it starts to lose effectiveness. That depends on the water pressure so I can’t give you exact numbers for your garden. However last year I used a 25m length across two beds as well as two sprinklers all running off a single four-in-one-adapter. And my plan this year is to upgrade to 75m of soaker hose to water both halves of my garden without using any sprinklers.

Connecting hoses to the Hozelock multi outlet adapter
If you connect the soaker hose to the water source at both ends, then you can equalise the pressure through the hose and ensure a consistent drip along its length. At 75m of soaker hose, I have to turn down the water flow – no pressure issues here!

But if you find you start start to have problems with uneven irrigation, then a solution could be to lower the water pressure at the tap or using the flow control adapter provided with the hose or to connect both ends of the soaker hose to your water supply which should even out the water pressure throughout the hose.

And before we move on, to why soakers are better for your plants and your yields, I’d love to know how you’re watering your garden already and how that’s working for you? Are you using drip hoses, are you using an automatic timer, are you watering by hand? Let me know in the comments below.

Automatic Watering Timer (Amazon)

But what’s that I hear you say… Why not just use a sprinkler or a drip irrigation system?

Well drip hoses are great for delivering water to a specific locations they require lots of custom attachments and a lot of setup time to build your system. This might be fine for sparse planting with ornamental plants and perennials where you need to deliver water to specific locations but for a vegetable garden or an allotment bed where you’re growing as much food as you can fit in, possibly with inter-planting and with the layout changing through the season, you don’t want to water specific places, the entire volume under the bed is going to be filled with roots. So what you really want is good, even coverage of the entire bed. Which means one of the supposed drawbacks of a soaker hose (that the watering isn’t targeted) is actually a positive in the vegetable garden.

Spray hose nozzle firing a jet of water
Soaker hoses are much better for growing veg than spray hoses or sprinkler systems as they waste far less water to surface evaporation and don’t wet the plant leaves which risks disease and promotes infection.

And the problem with sprinklers or spray hoses is that you cover all of the foliage in water and throw water onto the ground with enough force to create splash-back and cover the plants in muck. Which are all great things to do if you want to promote fungal diseases in your plants…
Blight on tomatoes, powdery mildew on squashes, rusting on alliums, these infections are all made worse by leaf wetness and you see them a lot during wet summers. So why make the problem worse and use a sprinkler every other day? And why do this and still have to waste water because of the high surface evaporation?

And the drawbacks of soaker hoses like uneven watering or (apparently) even pipes exploding can be entirely avoided by creating a closed loop and to ensure that there is an even pressure throughout the pipe and by avoiding excess pressure in the first place by turning off the tap a little bit or using the flow-control adapter that comes with the hose.

That’s why this year I’m going all in – converting the second half of my garden to using soaker hoses too.

Now this post wasn’t sponsored – no one asked me to make it. I’m just someone who loves growing food and I’m trying to help you guys to do the same. So if you’re interested in trying out a soaker hose, check out the links below to products that I’ve been using over the last couple of years.

And as always, Happy Gardening!

Watch this as a video: https://youtu.be/K6qs6U65vLc

Hozelock Porous Soaker Hose: https://amzn.to/490xJjn
Hozelock Aquastop Connector: https://amzn.to/3IGXcUs
Automatic Water & Irrigation Timer: https://amzn.to/3IEjhCL

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