Vegetables Gardening - Growing Organic Vegetables

I live in Ohio. I am planning to build a watering system this spring. In the winter the watering pipes will freeze. So I assume I will need to drain the pipes at the end of the growing season. I find nothing in the materials on how to drain the mainline in the garden each winter. How do I drain the line each year? Or does the plasic not break from the winter cold freezing the water in the pipes?

Dale

Dale & Group:

The key to properly draining your system is to have a "stop & waste" valve at the lowest point in each line of the system.

I usually design a system so that the water pipes are coming into the garden at the highest point, and I run the underground "header" pipe from the highest rows to the lowest rows. After that last row I place a stop and waste valve on the underground header, and include some gravel around it to help facilitate the draining.

In a small garden you may only have one header pipe, but in a large garden, like the 1/2 acre garden at Utah's Hogle Zoo and the one I'll be installing here in Missouri, we have several sets of rows, and each one gets a stop and waste valve.

Jim Kennard

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