WATER WOES

Garden Overview

Phew!  What a crazy month.  It seems we are always working or out of town and have hardly had any time to spend in the garden... when we do we do not have time to catch up on our record keeping etc! We have been eating chard and zucchini, lettuce - till it got too bitter, which it promptly did at a relatively small size once the weather got really hot again!,  berries, green beans, lemon cucumber, corn, onions, chile peppers.  Life is good.  Our harvest of each item has been small and sometimes a bit late as we are still not accustomed to harvesting.... we used to just name and worship fruit if it set as it was such a rarity in Mammoth!  We definitely need to get better at harvesting.

Lettuce, radishes and Swiss Chard 8/15

Lemon Cucumber 8/5

There have been many issues with the irrigation these past 4-6 weeks.  We finally got our system set up and on timers and adjusted so the soaker hoses, drip hoses, drip emitters, mini bubblers and micro sprayers were all adjusted appropriately and times seemed correct for each station... then the local municipal water district did some work at the source and installed flow limiters and everything changed.  So we went back to the drawing board and readjusted it all.  Got it right-ish again and then..... our irrigation guy brought the pump down!  We had been waiting for this for over a year now.  This set up means we can water from the creek.   We were ver excited but a bit apprehensive about another change to our irrigation.  And rightly so.  It turns out the pump is much stronger and much higher pressure than the municipal water district... so much so that several of our emitters were two fine/weak for it and would get blown off the lines.  We (Jim mostly as I was buried in work) had to change out most of the emitters, and reconfigure some stations.  It seems the micro soaker hoses and  micro drip lines are not working right on this system and certainly  not in combination with the mini bubblers and sprinklers on the same station.  We think we might have got this all sorted out and things are looking good when....... We learn the filters keep getting clogged and overloading the pump.  In a matter of days the filter is so clogged the release valve no longer cleans it out.  So we have to keep working on that.  If that isn't enough.... the hose bib in the garden has been rendered useless by the installation of the pump.  To use the hose bib, the sprinklers/timer must be on... missing the point!   We now have a new filter/cover over the first filter and Jim thinks this is helping (I'm not seeing it yet).  Jim has re-run the hose bib in the garden so it is temporarily connected to one at the house so we can still spray for bugs in the wee hours of the morning and spot water areas not getting sufficient water from the system.  The most recent event (of which we are aware) is that the watering system stopped working for two days (before we discovered it) and it turns out the plug strip had failed.  Not sure if this is a result of being overloaded by the pump or what?  We lost all of our corn most of the remaining surviving strawberries (we have had a devil of a tie getting that water right) and a couple of squash.  Oh well.  We knew this year was going to be an experiment/learning period.

Yummy Rainbow Chard from the Garden

And that doesn't even mention the drought and water restrictions!  So far our local water restrictions are quite easy for us to maintain.  We are up early, everything is automated and virtually nothing is ornamental.

We are finally getting more water to all the trees and they are looking much better.  The creek and ditch are low.  It turns out the ditch was so low because it was obstructed by debris upstream.  When I cleared the twigs and pine cones, weeds and leaves, the flow returned.  So much to learn, so much to maintain... but we wouldn't trade it for anything!

I swear it was tiny two days ago!!