Beds and gardens
Irrigation Design
Drip under the mulch, micro-spray in the raised beds, bubblers at the trees. Sprinklers water grass. This is everything else you planted.
Chapter 01
A spray head is the wrong tool for a flower bed
Sprinklers throw water through the air across an open area, which is exactly right for Bermuda and fescue turf and exactly wrong for almost everything else. Aim one at a bed and most of the water lands on foliage instead of root zone, evaporates off the mulch on a Tulsa August afternoon, or blows onto the siding and the windows. The plants that are meant to be drinking it end up with wet leaves and dry roots, which is how you get fungus and thirst at the same time.
It also wastes a startling amount of water. Drip and micro-spray delivered to the root zone, on a controller that knows what the weather is doing, typically cuts irrigation use thirty to fifty percent against an older system that sprays everything the same way.
So the beds get their own zones, their own emitters and their own schedule. That is the whole idea behind designing irrigation separately from designing sprinklers.
A large brick Tulsa home with a striped lawn and deep planted borders along the front elevation, all fed by an in-ground system
Matching the method to what is actually planted
Drip line runs under the mulch through flower beds, borders and vegetable gardens, putting water at the base of each plant slowly enough that clay soil can absorb it instead of shedding it. Micro-spray covers shrubs, ground cover and specialty plantings where a broader pattern is genuinely wanted but a full head would be violent. Bubblers sit at the base of trees and larger specimens, filling a basin and letting it soak deep, which is what a mature Tulsa oak or a young crepe myrtle actually needs rather than a light daily sprinkle.
The design work is deciding which of those goes where, and then grouping them into zones that share a watering need. A raised vegetable bed in full sun and a shaded border under an oak both want water, but they do not want it on the same day or for the same length of time. Put them on one zone and one of them is always wrong.
We fit Hunter and Rain Bird components here as everywhere else, so any competent irrigation technician can service what we built. Smart controllers with weather-based scheduling adjust the run times themselves as the season moves, which matters more in Zone 7 than people expect, because a Tulsa spring and a Tulsa July are not the same climate.
Chapter 03
Retrofit, redesign, or built in from the start
If you already have a sprinkler system, bed irrigation is usually added to it rather than built alongside it. We check whether your existing pressure and controller have room for the extra zones, and go from there. Under-pressured zones are the single most common reason a lawn will not green up, so we would rather find that during design than let you add load to a system that is already struggling.
If you are planning new beds, hardscape or a full landscape, the time to talk is before anything is planted. Running drip through open ground is straightforward. Retrofitting it under established plantings and finished mulch is not, and neither is fixing the drainage that new beds so often expose.
The consult is free and it happens on the property, because what you planted and where you planted it is the entire brief. Pro Sprinkler has designed irrigation in this soil since 2003, licensed, bonded and insured in the State of Oklahoma, with a one year warranty on new work.
Pro Sprinkler designs bed and garden irrigation free on site across Tulsa and Green Country. Call (918) 592-5555.