Furrows
No Furrows
little messy missy
Thursday, July 15, 2010
How Do You Water??
I am experimenting with my outside water situation. I have well water. I have zero pressure. Every year I spend ALL summer dragging hoses. I don't mind irrigating the grass but the garden, the food we eat the entire year, is a tough one to do. I am considering furrows. Last night I spent a couple of hours and made a couple of furrows to see if I like it better than just sticking a sprinkler head on the end of a hose and pulling it all day. I am at a loss and need some new ideas. If I go with the furrows I will be making at least 60 of them because our garden is HUGE! Like I said, we preserve, bottle, dry, sell and store everything and count heavily on it. So if you have an opinion please let me have it. I should just point out right now I am up at 5 turning on all the water, feeding animals etc. and then every 40 minutes the ENTIRE day and sometimes late into the night I am dragging hoses. At 5 am you would be surprised to see how many people are outside. I am affraid that over the last 5 years my neighbors have seen all my nighties (sorry) and if I haven't put my glasses on yet I am sure they have seen me run into the side of the house or a huge tree while dragging hoses. Hahaha!!!
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12 comments:
Who has time to water? Actually, I have to water the chickens daily. But I drug the hose out the the chickens and put a knob thingy with another short hose so I could turn it off out there. Then I don't have to do all that dragging. And I can turn the water off at the house when I go inside. As for the garden...I prayed for rain. It stays fairly wet here normally...just not the start of this summer. I've lost most of my garden.
~Randy
Can you put one of those oscillating sprinklers? How 'bout hiring neighborhood kids for certain times of day? I don't know...I'm a city gal. I'm trying to figure out when our corn is ready to harvest.
bunny
I've only watered 3 or 4 times this year, and I'm lucky nothing has died because it's been a HOT summer! We're on a well too, and no outdoor hookup so I have to put 3 hoses together and pull them up from the basement hookup out of the house. It's a PIA. We have a water barrel that collects off the roof, I might put one at the top of our hill (by the garden) next year so I can water from that. Hopefully it'll work!
Watering the garden is the hard task of summer. I can only say that less is more when you have to water plants. Chose your veggies carefully and your flower garden even more so.
Don't do a drip system,which is a good idea otherwise, but not if you have a well. Unless you have a filter on each faucet, the sediment will clog the drip system and render it useless. We learned this the hard way.
We don't have a good well so we spend the summer spreading the precious resource out for different things. The lawn goes first. Lawns are water sponges. We have a very small one but we let it go in the summer. I'm thinking of replacing it with draught tolerant plants.
NO overhead watering(sprinklers). Furrows are great. Mounds are great. Spending hours watering in the morning.... priceless.
It's just what we do for fresh vegetables and home canned produce.
It's a labor of love.
Cute mental picture of you out there in your nighty...
My Dad used to water furrow style before he got old and lazy and installed a sprinkler system. It does work.
I grew up in Southern Colorado where water is treasured. I can remember helping my Mother make furrows in the garden to help with the irrigation. She would till the soil in the Spring before planting and then she or I would take a hand plow (wheeled cultivator) and create the furrows. She would also mulch quite heavily between the rows with leaf litter to keep from having to water so frequently.
You might try soaker hoses laid the length of the rows and then just connect each soaker hose to your regular hose when you're ready to water. I know buying soaker hoses could be a big expense, but you can make your own by taking old hoses that would otherwise be discarded & poke holes in them with an ice pick. You could let your neighbors know that you are wanting old hoses or you could try posting on the FREECYCLE network in your area that you are wanting old hoses.
Good Luck to you! And please let us know what you do.
{sorry for such a long comment!} :0)
We have a geothermal heat pump, so it uses water from the earth to heat and cool... instead of letting the discharged water go run into the pond, we hook it up to sprinklers. Everytime the AC kicks on, the sprinklers do too. The hoses have "Y" connectors with little switches to change sprinklers. If you have a geothermal heat pump, you might try that...
We made some cracker crap the other day. It was delicious! Thanks for the recipe!
I would go with the furrows or soaker hoses.......
Have you tried rainbird sprinklers with the smaller holes....if you use one too big without a lot of pressure, it wont work......
You could try ollas! http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/2008/03/24/using-ollas/
They're not cheap, but I feel like some sort of permeable ceramic containers could be found at the thrift store. Just make sure the mouth is covered so no little creature falls in and drowns.
don't know enough to help but just moving hoses for my front and back yard irritates me! Furrows seem to be the way to go. We had a teeny garden in Texas and used soaker hoses. Dean's folks had a HUGE garden but also had 4 kids to do the hose dragging!
make some above ground sprinkler with sprinkler pipe and heads and just leave them in the rows.
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