Irrigation Systems

I've been working on designing an irrigation system for my garden. Luckily, a good friend is an engineer, so he knows how to design things like that. I start looking at all the different parts and configurations and my eyes start spinning.
We bought all the parts, starting with 100' of irrigation tubing, and we inserted the female attachment where the garden hose will hook up.

The other end gets closed off so easily with one of these: 

We laid the mainline throughout the garden, no more than about 5 feet from each plant. Adding drip emitters is pretty easy - simply punch a hole in the main line, attach a single barbed coupling to the main line, insert one end of the rubber distribution tubing into the coupling, cut the tubing so it reaches your plant, then attach a 1 gph or 2 gph dripper to the end to deliver water right to the plant. You can see the set up here: 

I only had 1 gph drippers, so sometimes I used a t coupling and attached two rubber tubes, each with a dripper to go to the same plant. I suppose it's more economical to just buy the 2 gph dripper for the larger plants, so I might swap it out in the future. 

For trees, my friend and are experimenting with soaker hose attachments. We cut a length of the 1/2" mainline tubing, and closed off one end with the end closure. On the other end, we attached a coupling to connect directly with the soaker hose, and secured the attachment with a clamp on the soaker hose. 

I inserted an end cap at the end of the soaker hose, also securing it with a clamp. With the 1/2" tube, I poked a hole, inserted the coupling and connected that part to the mainline. 

I've been playing around with this set up in the garden. The problem I'm finding right now is that this particular type of hose, while it doesn't seem to deteriorate and clog up the way the rubber soakers do, it does tend to kink a lot, especially when dealing with a shorter length. I'd cut one long piece to go around several plants, and that one seemed to do okay, but the shorter pieces, like the one above, don't seem to work as well because they don't curve well around the plant, so multiple kinks develop. 

I'm going to get another soaker hose and play around with that a bit, see if it works better.