Joshua Siskin writes the garden column each week.
I recently wrote here about my drip irrigation lines getting chewed up by urban wildlife. I’ve seen squirrels, skunks, raccoons, and opossums in my backyard over the years, but learned that coyotes could also be implicated where biting into these soft plastic water lines is concerned.“Nocturnal visitors are a problem we have faced. Aside from a family of raccoons wandering the streets at night, we have a healthy and curious family of squirrels in the park nearby.
After combing the internet for ideas, the one that worked for me was simple. I brewed up a batch of pepper tea, throwing in chili powder and every other hot pepper product in my house. After a nice long steep, I let it cool down, strained it, loaded it into a spray bottle, and shot the emitters liberally with the concoction. It was applied every few days for a while, as our watering cycle would dilute the effect, but eventually, the problem was solved. I have not had to reapply in months.
Enter Gene Goldstein. He has extensive experience in drip irrigation and has settled on 1/4″ spaghetti tubing that you connect to the main line wherever an emitter is needed. While most of us think of emitters as being at ground level, he stakes his DIG Micro Spray emitters four inches up in the air, although 13″ inch stakes from the same manufacturer are typically utilized for staking these emitters. You screw the threaded emitter into the spaghetti tubing prior to attaching it to a stake.
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