Elevated Irrigation

After the beans and peas planting, it was a couple of days before any of us got to the farm. Mommy and Ellie flew to Virginia and North Carolina for Ellie’s 3rd grade trip.

The visited Roanoke, Jamestown, and Williamsburg.

Ellie wasn’t sure about it at first because she didn’t want to be the only child. She prefers to have Evie around to talk to all the strange grownups so the grownups don’t talk have to talk to her.

But she ended up having a good time anyway, and surprisingly, the strange grownups weren’t so bad after all.

The other kids were at Papa and Deedee’s house, and Daddy had four clinic workdays in a five day period, so no one was really working at the farm.

Other than for morning chores. Morning chores are important for more than simply making sure the animals get fed and moved. It is also a time to notice what is going on, see what needs to be done, and start planning out the next few farm days.

Like this hemlock. Well over six feet tall, with early flower buds forming. That needs to come out soon!

But not today. Let’s see, this was Friday the 22nd. Continuing to improve the garden infrastructure. This is a cheap and easy way I found to create an elevated irrigation system.

1/2 inch EMT conduit cut into three foot lengths. Initially I was trying to use the Milwaukee multi-tool to cut them, but that ran out of battery, so I just grabbed a hacksaw and got them all cut faster than I could recharge the battery. Technology. It’s great when it works, but sometimes the oldschool ways are faster and better.

Hauling the wire and conduit sections out to the garden.

Each pair of T-posts got a crossbar.

It’s a pretty simple design, just a length of fencing wire doubled over and run through the conduit. The far end loops around the top of the post and twists a couple of times, then the near end is wrapped around the other post, and twisted to cinch the whole thing tight.

This creates a cheap, simple cross brace, strong enough to hold an irrigation hose, a simple trellis or climbing pole, or a high tunnel or shade cloth.

In the meantime, we noticed we had not put sluggo down on the cucurbits, and they were looking a bit the worse for wear, so Evie sluggoed them. Once the summer is really hot and dry, we won’t bother about that anymore, but it is very easy to lose a whole bunch of cucurbit starts really fast in the spring around here if you don’t keep the slugs at bay.

There are three rows so far with the paired T-posts, and each one of them got cross-braced that day.

Long before we got that done, or even well started, it the sun was hot and high, and it got very warm out. The kids call it “hot” because they’ve never lived in the deep south, or Iraq, or even upstate NY.

We didn’t get it

They made a makeshift shelter and ate their lunch in the shade.

Winnie made an important and exciting discovery. Some of her ‘tatos are sprouting!

It wasn’t until late afternoon that we got the irrigation hoses up.

We tested them on the timers and found they work quite well, with a nice even spread of water, dense on the row where we want it, and not too much on the pathway where it is not needed.

The solar powered timers are not as helpful as I would have liked, but they were cheap and they will do.

Why all this effort to raise the sprinkler hoses? Well, it isn’t all about the sprinkler hoses. It is also infrastructure for high tunnels, shade cloth and trellis work.

But it also, elevating the sprinkler hoses will help us not have to replace them so often, we hope. Last year they kept getting chewed up by voles. They are not repairable, and when they are on the ground, not only are they easy targets for the voles, they are hard for us to see, so we don’t always notice they are leaking until it has been several days, or even weeks, and by then, one tiny section of the row will be drenched and the rest will be dry. Hopefully this will keep them out of the reach of the voles, and in our line of sight.

Of course, it will also expose them to more UV light, which does degrade all plastic products, so we will see whether this is a net gain.