Flexon 50-Foot Three Tube Sprinkler Hose FS50

Soaker hoses are nice for a foundation but they don't water very well. They have a relatively low flow-rate which means that the water gets absorbed into the ground before it can really spread out. So you wind up with a 1 foot path that is really well watered and bone-dry next to it. These hoses have small holes ever few inches that will cause tiny streams of water to shoot out, similar to what you get when you squirt a water-gun. There is very little misting-action that occurs even with good water pressure, even when the squirts reach about 5 feet into the air. Hence, cranking up water pressure to try to cause it to mist will just make the squirts bigger and thus water much further out. I have a tiered garden about 25 feet long and 10 feet wide on top and ran this hose back and forth to make 2 watering rows. I did the same for my bottom section and connected them with a Y-connector. By turning on the water 1/3rd pressure so the squirts were about 1 to 2 feet high, I let it water for an hour. The entire garden was very well watered with extremely even coverage. I was actually surprised because I thought that I'd have tons of 'spots' where each stream watered an area. But this was not the case because the droplets are small enough that wind blows them around and the droplets scatter fairly well to cover a small area on their own. Furthermore, I'd guess this system is about 80% more efficient than my old system of using a oscillating sprinkler (the back and forth, spray water in the air system). With the sprinkler, after an hour on high, a ton of water would be blown away or vaporized and caught by the wind. Garden was watered but it was spotty. These hoses though give me much more even coverage, much more water onto the garden, at about 1/3rd the water flow! The bottom line is that I am very pleased with these hoses. They are very good for a garden where you have a lot of different stuff planted and not a whole lot of order. In a well-done garden, they use irrigation so that each plant has an individual nozzle where it gets drip-fed straight to the roots. However, this requires a decent amount of work and pretty precise placement of plants. As enthusiasts, we are still trying out different plants and are not near ready for a drip-irrigation yet. Hence, this hose is a perfect way to easily get good coverage for our garden.