It works perfectly, the only problem is that I find it difficult to "guess", WHEN and FOR HOW LONG I should water the tomatoes ? People have different opinions regarding that "1 in. / week." I also find it pretty difficult to avoid the “uneven watering”. Some of my tomatoes are watery, so I'm sure I'm overwatering. Some cherry tomatoes split. I water less lately.

While I can check the soil humidity using a Soil Moisture Meter where my tomatoes have straw mulch, it's much more difficult to do that where I used fabric mulch. I'm VERY careful not to hurt tomatoes' roots, because in the past I had very, VERY bad experiences hurting unintentionally tomatoes roots. The tomatoes simply wilted in 2 days.

Even more difficult I find FERTILIZING using drip irrigation. Here are two threads I found in GardenWeb:

Fertilizing via drip irrigation and

Fertilizing with drip irrigation

Did anybody use EZ-FLO, Add-It fertilizer injector or Dosatron ?

The problem is you set it up based on the conditions for the worst day (hot and dry) so the plants won't dry out and be hurt. Then you wake up the next day and it is raining, or the temperature is lower, or it is just very humid and moisture stays in the earth.

Meanwhile your automatic watering goes merrily along dumping more water no matter what, and eventually you set up the conditions for disease in the roots like any chronic overwatering will lead to around my parts anyways. I have problems for the whole concept of drip watering tomatoes anyway since I subscribe to the good root watering to field capacity and letting the soil dry out a bit before the temporary wilt point, and that works better in my environment to control disease and the tomatoes seem to love it. YMMV.

Based on that, I decided it wasn't worth it and I'm back to manually watering where I feed my tomato kids exactly what they need. It took me two weeks in advance to hone the flow rate on the irrigation system - more time than the vacation itself, and by the time I was back, both the plants were drinking a different amount and the weather had changed enough that a dumb system was getting to be like a fish out of water.

I'm not sure what zone you are in, but these things will really vary. It says NY, but zone 10, which could be subtropical, or arid. I'm thinking in an arid hot area, drip irrigation might be very useful, but not in a spongy humid area.

I mix all of my fertilizer by hand because I want to be darned sure what's going on so nothing suffers from salinity burn, and I have used a Dosatron type system, but not for this for that reason!

The other thing is the soil's drainage quality. With a well drained soil a little more watering is not going to be crucial.

1" of water over a 2 foot diameter plant is 3.14 sf times 1/12 ft equals 0.26 cubic feet times 7.481 gallon/cf therefore is 1.9 gallons over three watering times is 0.6 gallons three time a week. It would take your 0.5 gph emitter watering the plants 2 hours per cycle. Your limiting factor is the pressure loss for each emitter. See if you can find the pressure loss per emitter on-line or let us know the brand and we can look it up for you. If the design pressure is around 25 psi the loss should be a certain psi. So you have 20 psi loss for the total loss of the zone.

What do you think ?