I use the 1/4″ and 1/2″ black tubing for drip rrigation. I do not bury, and I use no drip tape. All tubing and emitters are hard plastic. I have never had critter damage, and I have squirrels, chipmunks, moles, voles, and a few others. That said, I live on a lake, so 100′ from garden, there is lots of water.

Here’s a tip for the caller looking to move to Tennessee (and anyone else looking to walk to freedom) that wants to get a handle on a new area while keeping their costs as low as possible:

If you look on Airbnb (or VRBO, the lesser-known equivalent) there’s typically two types of rentals: Ones obviously owned by investor types who have real-deal property managers running their units almost like hotels, and listings for spare bedrooms, mother-in-law suites, and similar that are folks who have unused space looking to make some extra cash on the side.

For the former, the rate is what it is and there’s no negotiation that can be done as the people handling the rentals are basically robots. For the latter, they’re typically super negotiable under the right circumstances as there’s a few different factors they deal with: Unpredictable occupancy and dealing with new folks coming and going.

For example, your typical person renting out a spare bedroom might have a few bookings in a month where people stay over a weekend. For each of those rentals they need to deal with cleaning the room, meeting the renters, walking them through how to get in and all that other junk, etc. which is all sort of a hassle if you’re managing it all yourself as a property owner.

What I’ve found is that if you’re looking to stay somewhere for a longer period of time, you can score some crazy deals if you find the right host. I spent three months in Barcelona, a few blocks away from the beach, for $600 a month a few years ago. For me, all I was looking for was a place to shit, shower, shave, and sleep, so a spare bedroom in someone else’s apartment was totally fine.

I contacted a bunch of hosts and explained that I was living out of my suitcase, working online, wasn’t looking much more than the essentials, and didn’t expect them to do anything other than give me a key and point me to my room. I told them I’d be more than happy to pay what they typically book in a month on Airbnb, in cash, which is a pretty huge perk as Airbnb has all sorts of fees that gets scraped right off the top- Not to mention any local taxes that must be reported.

Intelligent Airbnb hosts in this outreach realize that they’d make more money and both have less to do and less to worry about by just taking my cash, which allowed me to live all over the world for practically nothing.

One very important thing in doing this is to do this negotiation either via Skype or phone, since you’re actively asking the host to break the Airbnb rules by renting to you for cash outside of their payment ecosystem and smart hosts will not want to do that over the Airbnb message system. Additionally, it’s VERY IMPORTANT to realize that you’re also waiving the renter protections Airbnb offers if you book a place, show up and it’s not right, the host cancels, or anything else.

I never had any problems, but, it’s worth mentioning as YMMV. I always made sure to at least have an idea of what I could do for a backup if I arrived and things weren’t what they seemed.

The other cool perk of doing this is when you stay with someone for a month or so you typically get to know them pretty well. I’m now fairly decent friends with all the various Airbnb hosts I stayed with, and they’re happy to have me back whenever I come around to their city again.

Anyway, every time I tell someone about how you can do this they’re blown away… So I figured I’d share. Hopefully it helps someone in the TSP community.