Posts Tagged ‘Cost benefit’

Water: Useful

It’s the little things that make you happy most often.   But sometimes a big thing will do it too.

We have a 600’main irrigation line that runs down the middle of our growing field with manifolds every 60 feet.  We built it in the wet season of 2007/2008.  By built I mean we dug the trench by hand, laid the pipe, tested, fixed, and buried it again.  It was good work to do while it was too wet to stuff on the straw bale field shed.  And boy, are we glad to have it now!  At the field shed we get about 35 psi and plenty of pressure in the fields to run the drippers.  We can also mix stucco, wash dishes, spray dogs…  Water is really useful stuff!

Here’s a link if you want more detail on our straw bale project, our irrigation system, or the effects of pipe dope on farmers.

All of our irrigation is automatic and drip.  Just like a coffee maker, except different.  It saves water, which we have to pump from the ground, and helps us control weeds a lot better.  Plus it’s fun.

We water our trees and veggies when we aren’t there using timers.  Using evapotranspiration data from a local sensor station and a spreadsheet I put together I can calculate how many minutes we need to keep each line on to provide the proper water balance.  It worked like a charm last year on our 15 trees and test field.  However, our teeny weeny 250 gallon tank was pressed pretty hard in June, our hottest month.  This year we have increased our veggie field to 2400 sf and replaced the citrus trees that died in the frost and bog (Orchard 1 was very … instructive) with more apples and stone fruit.  We are also going to put in a 3,000 gallon tank to support it.

Some of the major takeaways from last year’s crop mix:

1. We can grow way, way more fruit trees for the water we use on veggies.  No duh.  That’s why everyone has orchards around us.

2. If we must grow veggies, we could grow more if we concentrated on spring and early fall crops.  Growing row crops in the summer is expensive.

For the growing part:  We covered the little hoop house and put our first flat of Annie Girl tomatoes in.  I got the wrong irrigation drippers (I got dribblers instead of sprayers) so we had to get clever with how all the soil would stay moist.  We took a flat black tray and put potting soil in the bottom, then our filled moss cups on top of that, then soil around the edges.  We set the timer for 2 minutes of daily dribbling, which covers most of the cups.  I’ll see how they do next weekend, but I’ll have some sprayers in my pocket.

25 square feet is a lot of space for growing starts for us this year.  We’ll add more tomatoes, basil, and spinach next weekend.  We haven’t tried spinach out here yet, but the basil started late when we planted it from seeds in the ground.  Then again, the rabbits didn’t eat it.  Silly rabbits.

We ran the irrigation line and set new drippers for the 15 trees.  They’re all together now in Orchard 2.  This is much better.  They have better soil, a little slope to let the cold air and water roll away, and less poly pipe for gophers to go after.  We won’t turn on the water for a couple months yet, but it will be ready when we do.

The day job has me in the Bay Area a lot more than I was last year at this time.  We have to work a lot smarter when we get up here and plan a lot better.  Fortunately we have a year of lessons that are really helping!