Bear with me, this is a memory from my childhood of maybe 60 years ago or more.
The sprinkler was a long tube, but basically 2-dimensional with a flat bottom, and holes all along the top side (of course it would also puff up into more like a cylinder when water was running through it), and maybe 2 inches or less wide when it was flat. The one I remember was green and some kind of plastic material. You would unroll it, lay it on the ground, connect it to a hose, and turn it on. It would water an area whatever the length of it was by maybe four feet wide (not sure about the width). It seems to me that it would have been at least a little better at conserving water than most sprinklers, because the water did not arch very high so less would evaporate, and it was distributed evenly down the length of it, rather than coming from a central point.
I’ve been searching through all the sprinklers I can find online, and apparently this kind is not made any more, but I’d be happy if I’m wrong. It had no moving parts so the only thing that could go wrong was if it developed a tear somewhere.
I believe you are talking about soaker hoses. Personally, I don’t like them because they are too flimsy and the Arizona sun tears them up in less than a year.
This sort of soaker hose works better for me, but YMMV.
Yes, no sooner did I post here than I thought of a different search term, and found these. Sprinkler hoses.
It’s not a soaker hose because the water is sprinkled up, not dribbled down. But as I see with most of them now, they can do either soaking or sprinkling depending on which side is up.
I don’t know if these are the kind we used to have when I was a kid, but I think they’ll do the job. Thanks for the suggestions.
If you’re concerned about having the water evenly distributed, consider a hose-mounted square spray sprinkler.
This device (I found this image on eBay, described as “vintage”, but I think you can still buy them in hardware stores or garden stores) covers a square area, so it gets the corners, and it distributes the water spray fairly uniformly thoughout the area of coverage, not just at the edges. This particular unit, made by Gilmour I think, has additional advantages: The base is fairly heavy, so it will stay put where you put it. And you can attach another hose to the other side, thus daisy-chaining several of them. Airborne water evaporation may be a problem.
We have a small yard, and have never had sprinklers, my husband is one of those people who likes to water the garden with a hose. I just discovered that he is dead set against sprinklers of any kind, so I guess we won’t be getting any.
My parents have one of these, and still use it. I think it’s around 40 or 50 years old. I don’t think they ever daisy chained it, and I’m fairly certain I never did. It was my job to make sure the grass got watered in the summer, if the rain didn’t do its job.
