I have an irregularly shaped front lawn and I am able to water the entire area with a single sprinkler head centered right in the middle. Not only can I water the entire area but I don’t have any overspray onto sidewalks, driveways, and planter beds.
The secret is not complicated; I use a center pivot in-ground popup smart sprinkler that can conform its spray pattern to any distance between 5-feet and 30-feet or each radial increment around it’s entire circumference.
What that means in layman’s terms is that as the spray head circles around I can tell it to spray only to the edge of the lawn, no matter how close or far the edge is to my sprinkler.
It sprays only about 8-9 feet without over-spraying my sidewalk, it sprays roughly 12 feet without over-spraying my driveway, and it sprays 20 feet up to the lower edge of my garden beds that flank my yard to the West.
It has so many points that can be set around the circumference that the sprinkler can perfectly follow a curved line along the perimeter of my yard.
Basically if there is line of sight from the edge of the yard to the head I can sprinkle it perfectly and precisely.
I can even set the sprinkler to apply any amount of water to my lawn I want in terms of gallons or more conveniently inches. Each time the sprinkler circles the lawn I can mark that as 0.05″ of water applied to the entire area whether it’s close to the center of the spray radius or far out near the edge.
If the head circles twenty times then that equates to 1-inch of water applied to the sprinkler zone.
As you would expect this smart sprinkler is basically a computer installed underground. It is connected to a master controller box in my garage that is connected to my wifi. Scheduling can be as simple or complex as I like and it can use local weather data to adjust just like many of the more common smart sprinkler controllers on the market today.
Because this sprinkler head can’t spray less than 5-feet it can only be placed on lawn spaces that are at least five feet wide which means many parkway strips can’t accommodate a sprinkler of this style.
Luckily the control box is also capable of controlling conventional popup sprinklers and drip lines so irrigating many irregularly shaped parts of the yard very easy.
Overall watering the lawn with one of these systems is almost entirely hands off once it’s installed and I’ve found the installation of this system to be far easier than the installation of a traditional in-ground sprinkler system.
The system I’m using is called Irrigreen and I wouldn’t go back. It saves me a lot of water over the course of the year and I don’t have to fiddle around with setting up hoses and above ground sprinklers to get strangely shaped areas of my lawn.
Alternatively the Oto lawn sprinklers accomplish similar results to Irrigreen but that system is an above ground system so you need to send a hose out to the Oto control box in the lawn. I feel like if you have more than a single irrigation zone Oto lawn sprinklers quickly become less attractive than Irrigreen. Having everything underground and connected together is awesome and easy to control a full sized lawn with well more than 10 irrigation zones.
The cheapest of all entry level options for watering a round or irregularly shaped yard is to use the above ground center point sprinkler from Gilmour called the circular pattern master. It does everything Irrigreen does except there is no computer control box or phone app and you have to drag a hose out to the sprinkler and set everything up manually.
You can still set radius points around the sprinkler but there is only a limited number of points you can set and the sprinkler only fluctuates in distance from roughly 15 feet to 25-feet. This does give you the flexibility to create shapes of water in the yard but not enough to give you precision.
Irrigreen is the most expensive of the three options here but it offers the most value and water savings and I believe it increases the value of my home because I have a fully smart in-ground sprinkler system installed as opposed to nothing at all.
You can see my thoughts on the cost of Irrigreen here or my experience installing the system in my own yard here.
To price out your own system make sure to use this link which currently gives you a free sprinkler head when you purchase a new system – https://irrigreen.com/discount/TURFMECH
