Weekly Homestead Happenings

The past week here on the property we have been dealing with a lot of water issues (sorry to those of you who have read all of my numerous posts lately about water, I promise they will end soon!). Luckily we have been able to fix or see an end to them all. The week before last the well pump went out, which through my rushed frenzy meant that I broke one of our irrigation turnouts as well. Then last weekend our other irrigation turnout sprung a leak, which we still haven't fixed as the creek is WAY too high (we're talking highest we've ever seen it!). So mostly for the past week we've been planning irrigation fixes.

The upside of this is that we've been able to plan to redo the irrigation the way it will work best for us! I've been spending time researching drip irrigation, and learning about how all the different micro irrigation sprinklers and drippers work. I've got some 3/4 inch poly pipe for the orchard, and am planning to save up for some more for my garden to make watering easier and more efficient.

We've also planned a new pipe system so that we can have a hose going without having the main irrigation line on, so we can water our fruit trees without using our well. This is great, because it means we have water to irrigate with even without electricity. Technically we had this before, but with the old metal pipe system it was very hard to get good pressure, and we didn't have pipes to get to the orchard area. Here is the new head system (the old one is to the right/behind), with the garden hose connection lower on the pipe below the pipe turn on.

We planned to get this in on the weekend, but it has been raining buckets here and we have to wait until the pipe outside dries out a bit to get a good glue seal with the new section. It has been exciting seeing our little creek (that runs dry by late summer some years) just raging along, and the main river down in the valley is getting almost to flood levels too! After the last day it has started dropping, but with snow levels up in the mountains reported to be about 150% of normal, if we get a series of warm sunny days in the near future, the river level will start rising fast again and we may get a real flood.

In the meantime though, I'm excited to keep planning and saving for all the little bits of irrigation piping and tubing to keep our fruit trees healthy and our garden growing strong. Since we moved here I have dreamed about having a simpler system to water the lawn and trees and garden, and we are finally moving towards that goal. It will also be really nice to not have a little stream running down our yard towards the garden & fields from the old (and now broken) leaky irrigation turn on that we used to have!

Head on over to the Homestead Barn Hop to see what other homesteaders have been up to this past week!