Irrigation

 

                For the last three weeks, I have been having irrigation part dreams. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night to images of fine soaker hoses, plastic parts that allow sprinklers on stiff tubing, and tangles of garden hose, worrying about the mess. It’s not for our backyard garden; that system took about ten minutes worth of work to become functional this month, when I did the first test run before laying down mulch. It’s the school garden that has been haunting my three AM moments.

                When I inherited the garden back during the pandemic, the three sheds were full of stuff that we did not need. There were boxes of third grade garden curriculum. There was an entire outdoor kitchen with three washing sinks. There was an oversized potting table or two, buried in blackberries. There were old seeds. There were more shovels than any garden could use, but just one pitchfork.  And there were three different styles of irrigation systems with all of the parts. I’ve been slowly finding homes for all of this excess stuff. Last week, I sorted through the weird irrigation parts and put the full bin by the shed. Two emails later, it was claimed by another school garden.

This spring, the Green Club had just enough money to invest in six raised beds- -wood and soil. The plan is to reign in the amount of garden in annual crops that need water, and expand the drought tolerant flower and herb beds, as well as berry and tree fruit crops. Lower maintenance. More beauty.  Better snacks. After we built and placed the beds, we planted and it got warm and dry, quickly. We needed water.

                Last fall, we pulled the entire system from the beds so that we could do a heavy leaf mulch and rework the spaces. I’d set the system  up three years ago from parts left behind by the past garden keepers, added  automatic timers, and been able to walk away from the garden for several weeks at a time. Here in the dry summers, weeds don’t really grow unless they have water, so a focused system is excellent weed control. But it leaked and extended into beds that did not need the moisture.

                 Setting up the irrigation system is a fiddly, one or two person task, especially if you are trying to reuse as much of the old system as possible. It involves laying out the heavy tubing, finding the pieces that will fill in the gaps and trying not to cut the few remaining long sections. It also (should, but does not always) involve an inspection of the tubes, because one was clipped by the lawn mower last year.  This also involves finding the ends— one to attach to the faucet or hose and one to block the water from flowing out of the end of the tube. There are now four rows of beds, so  this happened four times

Once the tubes were laid, I had to find all of the T pieces with the knobs to turn the water on and off for each bed—two per bed—and shove it all together. This is best done on a hot dry afternoon when the plastic is warm and flexible.  I spent several hours alone on a quiet afternoon, working on this task.  Once the heavy lines are laid down, I had help and we attached all of the tape lines into the beds, pushing them onto the knobs and then holding it all together with hose clamps. Instead of leaving the tapes twice as long as the beds (the old practice) I cut them all down to size. Then, we turned the water on, bed by bed. Geysers. I marked each problem with a piece of painted rebar and went back to class  for the day. It’s hard to fix a wet system.

Saturday afternoon, I went over to finish the job. All of the hard work was done. It was time to fix the punctures. I replaced some nicked, leaky, tubing with NEW tubing first.  I found a hose for each row of beds, the two manual timers from the far back corner of a shed, and two splitters so that everything was attached to the spigots in the garden. Then I worked on the tapes in the beds, replacing one row’s problems, then starting the water for that space and moving on. It was cool and quiet. Slowly, the garden went from a dry space to one quietly whispering that all is well. The plants are getting water.