Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

In smaller gardens (tinier farms!), hoses are generally a fact of life. On BIG veggie farms, “hoses” are usually pipes that’re 3-4″ inches (7.5-10cm) in diameter or more, and part of full-blown irrigation systems that suck up and spew MILLIONS of liters of water a season. Here on this tiny farm, I’m somewhere in the middle, but way closer to the garden hose end of the scale (in both water consumption and garden hose use!). The irrigation system itself is a work in progress, drip tape is the ultimate goal, but there are obstacles to work around, like the limited water available from the barn well, and the distance to and lack of electricity at the spring-fed pond. Right now, watering is about regular 5/8″ hoses, which are fed by a 1″ plastic pipe that runs from the barn well to the pond located WAY at the other end of the field, with taps at 100′ intervals. So, every spring, it’s time to check the fittings, uncoil the hoses, and get set to deliver water largely by hand. Actual watering is done with a combination of soaker hoses, sprinklers when there’s no wind, and various hand nozzles for watering in newly seeded beds. Quick connectors are a major convenience when hooking up the various combos of multiple hoses and other attachments. I try to find a balance between not too many hoses, because you can’t leave them lying around, and not too few that you’re moving around the same rig all over the plot. Accidentally tilling hoses that were left instead of being promptly put away has turned into a not rare occurrence, and a time-waster (untangling and splicing takes more than a minute). Just put away that 300′ of hose plus 500′ of soaker hose when you’re done! ;) It’s a bit tedious, but like everything else, you do get used to it, it’s part of the routine, and it gets the job done, which is satisfying in the end… That’s the state of the watering art around here as we head into a new season, and I’m promising myself advances on the drip side of things. Of course, it could happen to rain all the time, about an inch (2.5cm) once a week would be fine, and then hoses would largely vanish from the garden landscape. That’s not at all even remotely likely, but…YOU NEVER KNOW!

As far as winter irrigation in the greenhouse goes, melting snow in big barrels is the next best thing to a really long hose, a well and an electric pump. Fill ‘em up, cover with clear plastic, wait a day (even on a dull, cloudy day, it gets up to 60°F in the hoophouse). Repeat a couple of times, and you have 50 gallons of rainwater in a barrel! The alternative is dragging 200′ of hose through deep snow from the barn to the greenhouse, then reeling it in and draining it, every couple of days. The weather has put the kibosh on the early-March, barely heated greenhouse plan, the happy prospect until March actually came around. The nights have been regularly plunging to 10°F (-12°C), so it’s really not worthwhile to heat things up by 25°F. No worries. Adjusting expectations and schedules more or less by the day is all part of the fun… It’s never boring!

It’s supposed to rain tomorrow… I’m as skeptical as ever, still, as illogical as it is, you figure it’s gotta rain EVENTUALLY, so the longer it’s been, the more accurate the latest “60% chance of showers” forecast must be. Until then, we continue the piecemeal irrigation effort, with a combination of sprinklers and soaker hoses. The pond level is noticeably down, but bottom still isn’t in sight…and it’s gotta rain soon, right!?! :) Here, the latest beds of mesclun and spinach get their daily sprinkle. You can see by the fine mist in the air how easily much of the water can be lost to even a slight breeze, and to evaporation under a hot sun. Still, soaker hoses are only practical for larger standing crops, and pretty near useless for keeping newly seeded beds moist. From the pond pump, we get enough pressure to run four or five sprinklers and have 500′ of soaker hose set up, which means two or three of 40 sections can be covered at once. It takes a couple of hours to put down maybe 3/4-1″ of water. And the majority of days, we have to do early morning and evening sprinklers only, because of wind in the day. So, lots of moving hoses around… Next year, I’ve gotta figure out a drip irrigation solution…

The view out of the extended Milkhouse sliding door is not yet a great one—gotta move the big storage shed that blocks the view straight out to the field—but it’s become a common one this year. Amongst other things, the Milkhouse is a place to take refuge from extreme heat and, very occasionally, from…rain. And the extreme teasing continues. The latest is rain from INDIVIDUAL CLOUDS in an otherwise largely clear blue sky, that comes down just heavily enough to make you take shelter. A gutter hasn’t yet been installed at the front of the Milkhouse, so water streams down from the roof, which picks up more from the main barn roof, creating a deceptively abundant pool in no time. Actual rainfall for this little session: 2mm. (The tiny grey hose running across the pic is the original lifeline from the barn well to the field that in the first two and a half years was all that supplied water when the weather didn’t!)

We’ve been watering heavily (well, as heavily as our gear allows) for what seems like weeks. Rain has been teasing us, 5mm a few days ago after an impressive, all-day cloud build-up; last night, 2mm following a brilliant extended lightning show and promising bit of a shower that soon faded away. It’s terrible. Conall has been honing his newly acquired hose rigging and sprinkler positioning skills. For heavier watering, the set-up begins at the pond and continues along a 1″ pipe (a little small, but it’s what I have from Year 1, intended for the much lower capacity barn well) that runs the length of the field. Water arrives through a series of shutoff Y-valves and from the valve of the moment snakes through up to 500′ of 5/8″ garden hose. (Fluid dynamics is something I should apparently be studying, to get a grip on the water-reducing effects of our often convoluted hose, valve and quick coupler combinations.) The hose leads to sprinklers (never too efficient, and quite a waste with anything above a hint of a breeze) and soaker hoses (MUCH better, but a pain to run up and down beds and then move again). The pump can deliver only so much, so it’s a multi-day rotation of gear to get around the entire field. The golden upside: WATER to the crops!! It’s amazing how much energy half an hour of heavy rain can save…!

A first tray of early lettuce, set out in the unheated greenhouse yesterday afternoon, survived the around-zero night no problem. Lettuce is quite forgiving, and I’m forgoing the usual hardening off, going straight from the grow racks to the greenhouse ground. Although the sun feels great (it just came out now), hopefully it will only appear in breaks over the next couple of days, or the lettuce will be toast. The soaker hoses running up and down were on yesterday for a few hours to get ready for transplanting (without watering, inside the greenhouse, the ground obviously gets very dry).

The first day of fieldwork! Organizing hoses, picking up rocks. The ground is still quite wet, so we stayed on the paths, especially with the tiny tractor. (The Brothers are back volunteering, which is great!)