Archive for June, 2009
Water Magic
Or….More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about Irrigation!
To those who have used wheel-line irrigation, my romance with this system (new to us this year) will seem a little over-enthusiastic. But the magic of water under amazing pressure…just from gravity, just in flowing down from the mountains…has me hooked.
Brook and I worked so hard to assemble the used wheel-lines that we had purchased this year…days and days of work, frustrating complications, and worry over our pastures getting too dry before we could get the wheel-lines functional.
Our fear was allayed by a wetter and cooler than usual (and long) spring. Brook did flood-irrigate two of the fields before he left to join me in OH, but other than that, Mother Nature gave us all the time we so desperately needed.
The wheel line itself as well as the individual sections appeal to my sense of beauty:
And when we turned them on, the water was beautiful…and there were rainbows!
We have 3 of these lines and each of them has to be moved twice a day…we walk up from the bottom of the hay-fields and turn each one off, opening the lower end up so that it can drain. We begin with the 1/4 mile line since that one takes longest. After they are empty of water, we move each of the lines by 60 feet. (we do have to use a little motor to move the center section; the rest of the wheels roll along).
And then we start them sprinkling again…one by one.
All in all, we walk about 3 to 4 miles a day irrigating the pastures, good exercise in a lovely spot, birds singing, green all around. It doesn’t get much better than this….
unless you add the camas that was blooming under our feet when we put the lines together…
How it is with me….
Now that I am home from Ohio, and subsequently from a week’s work in AZ, I find that these photos of our darling cats express my condition better than words could ever do!
