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DeepDrop® irrigation for home orchards
Tomato is the base of many foods and sauces. In summer, in Spain, we could not imagine our lives without gazpacho, salmorejo or a good salad.
This fruit, which arrived in Spain after the discovery of America, is the most produced vegetable worldwide, reaching 16% in 2020. According to FAO, in Spain it represented a third of the total vegetable production.
Thus, the tomato is a highly prized vegetable that offers us many food values both in terms of employment generation in the fields, as well as for gastronomy and, therefore, also for the tourism industry. But it is also an excellent vegetable that is used in many home gardens in our country, which indicates its high use in households.
But in addition to tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and eggplants are also basic vegetables in our gastronomy and, therefore, in the gardens of this country.
In this article we report on the experience of a few of our customers who have introduced DeepDrop® in home orchards where it has brought more than just water saving benefits.
Deepdrop® is an easy-to-install localized subsurface drip irrigation system that has the advantage of being able to recover pipes previously laid for surface drip irrigation. In addition, DeepDrop® now also has a model for pipes with an integrated dripper. As we will see in this article, its main advantage is its ability to save large amounts of water and control or eliminate water stress in plants and trees. However, it has more. Some of them collected through the experience of customers presented in this article. You can learn more by visiting our website.
Family farm for restaurant and self-catering in Valladolid
At Restaurante del Arte in Medina del Campo (Valladolid) they have a premise: their food is seasonal, local and of high quality. Since they have their own fields, they have been producing their own tomatoes for years. Tomatoes that come from the seeds that Rafael’s parents and grandparents used to work with.
In his vegetable greenhouse, he has planted tomatoes and peppers. And for both crops he has been using the DeepDrop® subsurface and localized irrigation system since 2024. Last year they tested the system for a few tomato plants and when they saw the benefits they decided to expand the rest of this type of crop with this irrigation system.
He has 75 tomato plants that he has decided to plant one meter between rows and 70 cm between plants because what they are looking for is to obtain a high quality and flavorful tomato for the restaurant and the family.
Rafael has worked the soil to achieve this quality. At the beginning it was a clay soil, then he added sandy soil, compost, coffee borage, oak wood ash and a little bit of sulfur. He practices semi- fallow, since in the fallow areas he adds legumes such as lentils or chickpeas, which fix nitrogen in the soil.
Grow tomatoes type raff, marmande, Barbastro pink and Arrexabaleta pink. With DeepDrop@ with self-compensating drippers of 2L/h, the tomato irrigation has been as follows:
| Winter | Spring | Summer | Fall |
| – | Irrigation 30 min/day 2L/h
4 days/ week = 4L/ Week |
Irrigation 30 min/day 2L/h
7 days/ week = 7 L/ Week |
– |
Rafael tells us that when temperatures exceed 40 degrees during the day or 20 degrees at night (what we call tropical night) he adds 15 minutes a day so that the tomato plants can cope with the heat stress.
When asked about the benefits of introducing DeepDrop® in his tomato crop, he replied: “With DeepDrop® I consume less water, less soil compaction is generated, problems with fungi, pests and plant diseases are reduced because there is no waterlogging thanks to the system and because by avoiding evaporation in the greenhouse, the condensed water does not fall back on the plants, which also avoids the damage mentioned above. In addition, it is convenient to clean.”
Home orchard in Catalonia
Juan Carlos has a family orchard in the province of Girona in which he has planted tomatoes, peppers and lettuce, all with DeepDrop®. He has made his own irrigation plan that has allowed him to have a good crop of his vegetables. He also has implanted DeepDrop® with 2L/h self-compensating drippers.
And in his case his irrigation plan is to water 30 min/day both in spring and summer in the afternoon and when the sun shines the most. With this system he is very satisfied with the harvests he achieves.
Home orchard in Asturias
José Ricardo learned about DeepDrop® through social media. He previously had surface and sweat drip irrigation systems in place (although without burying).
José Ricardo has a 36 m2 greenhouse and another one of the same size outdoors. In his garden he grows tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and zucchini. He irrigates his garden with a 15,000-liter rainwater collection tank and a couple of 5,000-liter drums. With this water he irrigates his vegetable gardens all season long.
He installed DeepDrop® 2L/h self-compensating drippers in 2023. Whereas with the previous irrigations he watered 4 to 5 hours per week, he now waters only 2 hours per week. This means that he has achieved a saving of more than 50% of water compared to surface drip irrigation. He used to water at night to avoid evaporation, but now he waters when it is most convenient for him.
Ricardo also tells us that, for the last three years, he has had more tomato production and its size is bigger, as well as the rest of the vegetables he grows. “In addition, there are far fewer weeds, there is less irrigation of diseases for the plants and the economic cost of this irrigation system is amortized very quickly“, he concludes.
With the crop he harvests, Ricardo has enough tomatoes to supply 3 family homes with tomatoes for table tomatoes, and 200kg of tomatoes and zucchini to make ratatouille and other preserves.
Conclusions:
Three home orchards have been presented in very different areas of Spain: in Valladolid, Catalonia and Asturias. For all of them, the water savings have been substantial, but so has been the fact that far fewer weeds are generated, as well as the reduction of risks for the tomato plants associated with irrigation, such as, for example, waterlogging or the water that is released from the greenhouse due to evaporation.
We have seen that our customers, in addition to tomato plants, also grow other vegetables such as eggplant, peppers or zucchini. All of these are foods that we are used to eating in all the autonomous communities, even with different or similar recipes.
Finally, Rafael’s testimony also gives us some clues on how to maintain a healthy soil to achieve tasty and high quality tomatoes. Do you want to save water in your home garden? Summer temperatures remind us once again that we cannot let our guard down when it comes to using water, such a valuable resource.
