New farmers here. We are trying to set up our drip tape. Here are my notes and conclusion. Any advice is appreciated.

- Our Emitter Flow is 0.25 GPH.
- Tomatoes require 1 to 2 inches of water a week.

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From Cornell:
"Tomatoes need a minimum of one inch of water per week, preferably 1.5 inches in the heat of the summer. The bed measures 60 square feet (3 feet x 20 feet). One inch of water on one square foot is about a half gallon of water. For 60 square feet, you would need at least 30 gallons (60 feet x 0.5 gallons). That's a minimum amount needed in one week and you could easily double this amount in the summer.

In general the trickle tape is more versatile than the soaker hose. Although both are effective in slowly providing water, soaker hoses are not very effective when stretched more than 200 feet for a single bed. Also, if the water you are using is very hard or your source of water is from a pond or rainwater, you will be better off with the trickle tape. Water containing impurities will more likely clog the soaker hose even after filtering.

We know that one inch of water on one square foot is approximately 0.5 gallons. And we know that we want at least one inch of water on our tomatoes each week. So we need a minimum of 25 gallons per bed (one inch of water on 50 square feet equals 25 gallons). (You have planted 4 rows of tomatoes, each row is 25 feet long. That means that each row takes up 50 square feet (25 feet x 2 foot bed width).)

Let's say we purchase tape with emitters spaced every 18 inches and each emitter will have one gallon per hour seep out over one hour. For our example, each 25 foot row of tomatoes would have about 16 emitters (one every 1.5 feet). If each emitter puts out 1 gallon per hour, that means we would need to run the system about 90 minutes to supply the minimum amount of water. As before, I would recommend running the system about 1 hour every other day, assuming you have no rain.
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My Notes:

If we are trying to water a 40 foot bed, specifically the middle 2 feet of it, that is 80SF.

We need .5 gallons for each SF, so we times that by 80 to get 40 gallons per bed.

.25gph per emitter x 80 emitters per bed = 20 gallons output per hour.

So according to the math our tomatoes would need the timer on for 2 hours.

That seems like a lot, but is that right? We are growing a wide variety of crops in this area too.

Thank you.