Irrigation: The Leaky Truth

I told you I would tell you about my adventure with irrigation and here it goes…

We had just spent about 6 hours working on the garden. Tom, my husband, disked the field, then rototilled the field, then we took turns walking up and down the field with the Earthway seeder. I also spent many hours on planting starts. Bean starts, pea starts, egg plant starts, broccoli starts, cauliflower starts, squash starts, melon starts, pumpkin starts (but those aren’t this story), and of course tomatoes starts. That was a lot of hard and dirty work. Fortunately I farm barefoot so it was also a lot of fun, hard, dirty work. Little did I know there was still muddy work to be done.

Now, I have seen Tom “lay pipe” in a field, and his movements are so fluid. Mine our too, but a different fluid I guess. We laid 4 rows of PVC irrigation pipe, laid out the sprinkler heads, then Tom went to turn the water on so we could get started watering this ginormous veggie garden. It wasn’t long before he was back and the water going through the pipe had cleaned out any muck, leaves, and other (varmint) debris. He plugged in the sprinklers one by one and pressure started to build until we had arcs of water raining down on every inch of the field.

For most people this is the end of the story. But not us! I don’t know if it is normal or if Tom was just trying to drowned me but he said we had to go through and clear gunk from the sprinklers one by one. He of course neglected to show me the trick to keeping the sprinklers from getting me wet. Apparently you can stop the heads from rotating, and he was doing this. I should have paid closer attention, but I digress. He would call for a replacement sprinkler and I would run through the field 1) avoiding stepping on the starts and seed rows and 2) running in circles trying not to get doused by every single sprinkler, every single rotation. I failed at that second one. Tom was laughing so hard not just because I was being chased by water, but that I was failing at out running the streams of water. I assumed he thought I should embrace getting wet, so I did. I stopped trying to stay “kinda wet” and embraced that I was going to get completely soaked as I replaced sprinkler heads and brought Tom his replacement heads. By the time we were done I was barefoot again, not because I was having fun, but because the loosened soil was now filling the space that once held air with water and I lost my shoes too many times to want to put them on again until we were done.

It was so loud with all of the irrigation on that he didn’t bother saying anything until we were back in home. After I changed into dry clothes and with a towel on my head he informed me that he did not have to change his clothes, a fact I somehow did not observe earlier. He then took out a sprinkler to show me that if you hold the head (the tick, tick, tick-er) you can make the stream of water go where ever you want. Well at least he got his boots stuck too, or else I’da been, I’da been, well, I have been madder than a wet hen!

Thanks for reading my silly stories, I gotta go get this water out of my ears!

Natalie