Who brought the rain?

The day after my last post about rain and irrigating, we got 0.94 inches of rain at the farm.  I was at work during the day - where there was no rain.  Driving home I saw no evidence of rain until I turned down the gravel road that leads to the farm.  For the past few weeks while it's been so dry, the dust from the gravel road has gotten progressively worse, covering everyone's vehicles in a layer of dust.  That morning I had run my car through a car wash, even while I thought about what a waste of time & money it was, given that I'd be covered in dust again that evening. But then as I drove down the road Monday night, I realized that there wasn't much dust.  Then I saw a place on the edge of the road that had washed slightly.  Then I saw actual puddles.  Apparently it rained steadily for about 45 minutes - that almost inch - but there was a definite line where the rain had and had not fallen. The city of Faribault hadn't gotten any rain; our farm was, apparently, just within the northern edge of the system.  This is pretty exciting stuff for a farmer.

However, there is some contention about who brought the rain.  Farmer Bill doesn't currently have any way to water his apple trees with the irrigation system.  The long dry spell - and the lack of certain rain in the forecast - had him sending one of his crew out to water the trees manually.  They use a huge tank (500 gallons I believe) mounted on a small trailer; the tank has hose outlets and a crew of 1 to 3 people can haul the trailer to water anything not accessible by the irrigation system.  One of our guys was out giving each tree a drink - parking the trailer at the end of the rows and hauling the hose up and down when he felt sprinkles.  He called Farmer Bill to ask whether he should keep watering & Farmer Bill looked at the sky, looked at the radar online, and told him to keep going - the real rain was going to miss us.  So Michael kept watering.  Just like washing your car generally brings rain that day or the next, so does watering.

So, what brought the rain - me washing my car or Michael watering the trees?  We'll never know, but we'll always take the rain!

Musings on water

Another gorgeous sunny day, with hardly a cloud in sight.  It's been that way for about 3 weeks now.  There are few people I know who don't love this weather: dry, warm but not hot (upper 70s, low 80s), sunshine.  There are some who claim to like really hot weather (we haven't had much this year), but I have no sympathy for them since I definitely don't like really hot temperatures.

But not everyone can appreciate a long dry spell.  Farmers. Urban dwellers who cherish a green lawn.  My mother, whose yard is almost all flowers, shrubbery, and trees. Gardeners in general.  When I look back at our farm records, we've had a strange pattern of rainfall the past 3 years.  Lots of rain, much more than we need, in the spring, followed by extended dry spells in the summer.

The past 2 weeks Farmer Bill & his crew have spent a lot of their time irrigating the fields.  He uses overhead sprinkler irrigation and the Straight River is his water source.  The water pump is powered by the PTO on one of the tractors.  Water is pumped through 6-inch pipe across the river field to where the pipe goes underground.  The underground pipe goes up the hill and risers come out of it at various points.  Three-inch pipe is connected to the risers and strung out along the fields.  Sprinkler heads come up out of the 3-inch pipe and spray water in 60-foot circles.  Some of the crops also have an underground trickle irrigation option: the raspberries, blueberries and many of the melons. Trickle irrigation has benefits: virtually no evaporation when watering; less disease spread by water splashing spores onto the plants; not having to move pipe.  But several of our crops blossom when there is still possibility of frost, and overhead sprinkling is the best way to save those tender blossoms.  However, as any gardener will tell you, it's better to have rain. Rainwater just makes things grow better. There's a chance for thunderstorms today - it is August after all - but it doesn't feel like rain is moving in.  So the crew will continue to move pipe and pump water.