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.