Watering the Garden

We water the garden using an irrigation system. Irrigating was another one of those things that I knew existed while I was growing up, but I didn't know much about it. Those same neighbors whose garden I envied growing up also irrigated. It looked like a ton of work! The way they irrigated was with a large hose that they moved from one area to another. As I attempt to recall it, I think I remember the hose having holes and the canal water would come out of the holes allowing it to be a little like a sprinkler. But I mostly remember thinking that it looked so heavy and difficult to move that hose over and over again.

When Garrett and I first got married, little by little he showed me how the irrigation worked. Luckily, they already had a sprinkler system that just utilized the secondary water, so there was no need to haul a big heavy hose around. Garrett also explained to me that the garden, orchard, and pasture were irrigated by flood. This meant that instead of using the sprinkler system, we use large pipes with spouts that pour out into the garden, which is on a very slight hill. The water seeps through the furrows and into the ditch at the bottom of the garden and it all soaks there. This flooding is a process that takes several hours, since the garden is basically soaking up its weeks worth of moisture.

I also wanted to give you a quick update on what's coming up, because that is the part I really enjoy!

This is a new Pepper! We now have four growing.

This one is getting really big!

This is another new pepper - even though it's tiny, it still counts!

Some corn.

This is squash - I believe it's butternut squash.

And this is acorn squash.

It will be fun when I have some more of the actual produce growing that I can show pictures of, but for now this is still exciting to me!