Although neither of our extended families still had full-time farmers in them as my wife and I came of age, our parents, grandparents and most of our aunts and uncles raised gardens or livestock then froze or canned the meats and vegetables grown. Living what I now know was a relatively sheltered childhood, I thought everyone did the same things we did. Raising bottle calves, staining tee shirts while picking blackberries, stringing and breaking beans all summer long, refilling the under-sink potato bin from the storage crib every week, and hearing your elders discuss the need for rain on the gardens and pastures.
When I was around age 8, my family installed a system for garden irrigation. Although I have no clue what precipitated the decision, I do recall the approximate setup. A small creek separated my father’s land from my grandfather’s place. A portion of the stream bank was excavated and a one-piece concrete tank was installed such that a few ten-foot sections of three-inch PVC pipe could be run upstream and deliver water into the tank inlet. The holding tank was approximately 4x6x8 so it should have held somewhere around 1,500 gallons. From the tank, a two-inch black poly pipe ran up the mountain to the uppermost gardens, a bean field, and the potato patch. A tee installed near the one-third point allowed a second two-inch line to carry water out the valley to my grandparent’s garden and the sweet corn patch. The two-inch lines were branched further by running a pair of ¾ inch poly lines into each garden. These ¾ inch lines were each terminated with an impact sprinkler mounted on poles in the gardens. A Briggs and Stratton-powered suction pump was set atop the concrete tank to deliver the water. The system consisted of 1,000 feet of two-inch supply pipe, around 300 feet of ¾ inch distribution pipe, eight impact sprinklers, the pump, and tank.
With the gift of experience I recognize that although this system was straightforward in design, it was far from practical. The problem was grit. Although the pump had no trouble with the small amount of detritus that it lifted, these particles frequently clogged the sprinkler nozzles. In order to “overcome” this difficulty, an actual family chain had to be used to shout back for the pump to be turned off each time a sprinkler clogged. Because of the distance and terrain as many as six people would be needed to watch all of the gardens and relay the “stop” message. When the system worked it worked well. When it was having problems, a lot of time was wasted. As the youngest member of the crew, I was tasked with pump duty. How many of you remember the jarring shocks associated with having to ground out the spark plug on a small engine? Why didn’t I think to use a stick?
At the same time, we used this system, both generations of the family were reliant on a single spring for supply of drinking water. Several years of low rain and drought conditions led my parents to drill a well then within a couple of years my grandparents did the same. At 410 feet and 325 feet respectively, the drillers struck ample supplies and from then on garden watering was handled on a smaller scale with yard hydrants, hoses and the nearest well pump.
As newlyweds many years later, my wife and I moved from Georgia to Glendale, Arizona. Desiring a sense of the familiar we chose to install inground sprinklers and have our lawn hydroseeded. To save money I used a Rainbird design pamphlet supplied by the orange big box, graph paper and a compass to design our system. I enjoyed modeling the layout, exploring all of the pop-up sprinkler flow/coverage options, and gaining the experience. My design wasn’t perfect and the professionals laughed at my choice to build a central manifold for the valves instead of placing them throughout the installation area.
As the yard system was being installed, we added a separate zone for fruit trees and ran a supply line to the corner we planned to use for a garden. It was in our vegetable garden that we first experimented with Xeriscape techniques including micro-sprays and emitters. The general premise was the application of water close to or on ground level in a pattern that only covered the plant’s root zone. We grew beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, and strawberries in our little plot and are nostalgic remembering the flavor of our first homegrown broccoli. Our system was managed using a four-zone controller and the water was routed around the garden using 5/8 inch black “goof pipe” or what is now marketed as blank tubing. The individual micro-sprays were fed using ¼ inch drip line and where multiple lines were needed for a vegetable cluster, we used an eight-outlet manifold, supplied on a half-inch PVC riser.
After a couple of years in Arizona, a job opportunity was presented that would allow us to be a three-hour versus a three-day drive from our family. We moved into a suburban community on a half-acre mostly wooded lot. The layout of our lawn was such that only a smallish side yard received ample direct sunlight and with the poor growing potential of the hard-packed red clay, we chose to build raised beds in this area for our second garden. We built five beds of various shapes and sizes, each raised between twelve and sixteen inches over ground level. Building on our prior garden irrigation experience, each bed was treated as a zone by installing a buried one-inch PVC water line terminated with a Rainbird irrigation valve. At first, we tried using the micro sprays as we had out west, but wet leaves coupled with southern humidity led to disease issues and sickly plants. My wife switched to using adjustable emitters and drippers to keep the plants dry and root zones damp. Over time we also attempted to use soaker hoses woven throughout the beds but never found them to be worth the effort, time, or cost.
As with all gardening, some years were productive and some years were less so. One summer she grew and prepared so many eggplants that I have refused to eat them again since 2003. Our biggest issue with the raised bed irrigation was freezing. Having routed the supply pipes from beneath the bed corners, there was no way to drain the lines. I tried removing the solenoid valves to siphon the lines dry for winter but tended to lose at least one valve or supply line each year. In retrospect, the ball valve that separated the garden line from our home supply should have been the style that has a side drain port so the raised bed supplies could have been drained down for cold weather. I’m grateful that that we never had a freeze severe enough to damage the valve I did use, but lesson learned.
After living in suburbia and homeowners’ association (HOA) purgatory for twelve more years, we once again found ourselves preparing to move. For three and a half years my wife had been commuting sixty miles each way for work. God opened the door for me to switch careers and give back the time my wife was losing to her daily drive. Anticipating that we would eventually be able to move, we had spent a fair amount of time looking at property options closer to her new workplace while waiting on our current house to sell. Twice we thought we had solid options, but each of those doors closed. We ended up renting for two years after our move as I settled into a new career path and we looked for a home. We found the realtors in our new community to be underwhelming and the property options no better. Our criteria were: at least three acres, outside of any town or city limits, unrestricted or limited zoning, and absolutely no mandatory homeowners’ associations or related organizations. As a final “it would be nice to have”, I wanted a property with surface water. My wife found our current home on a snowy late January day and by force of her will and the Lord’s blessing, we owned it 28 days later.
During our first visit, the realtor pointed to the south end of the property and told me that there was supposedly a spring in that direction. I immediately took off to search through blow-down and clear-cut brambles. It turned out that in fact there are two springs and several hundred feet of the property line is a four-foot wide ten-inch-deep stream that originates from a different set of springs two properties “up” from ours. One of our springs feeds from beneath a large oak and the second bubbles up through the sand like a miniature water volcano.
I have measured the combined output of our two springs at over eight gallons per minute — although during the 2016 summer drought, the flow dropped to just under three gallons per minute (GPM). An elderly neighbor has told me that when his grandfather was “only a lad” these springs were where the local boys would keep their minnows to sell to fishermen on the weekends. As I was developing a lower section of the stream formed by the spring heads, I uncovered one of the old wooden minnow boxes. We will return to how these springs feature into our homestead irrigation in a few paragraphs.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 2.)