Our weather has not been cooperating for much garden prep work this week – spring in the Rockies means snow, bitter wind, and cold – rotating with warm, sunny, dry weather. This week was more of the snow, wind, cold kind of weeks. But we got a little work done on the changes and additions we are doing to the garden drip systems. Sorry no pictures this week, we were trying to work fast between storms and I forgot.
Gardens
We have had a drip system in the main veggie garden for a few years now and we LOVE it. It was easy to install and inexpensive. It saves us time, money, and water – and the plants grow better with it. You can read about that installation by clicking here.
This year our goal was to expand the veggie garden drip system a bit into the newly remodeled garden areas that are near it.
We also wanted to install new drip system in the strawberry patch, container herb garden, and to each berry bush. We wanted to hook up our rain barrels to those three sections. In years past I have used hoses hooked up to the rain barrels to hand water the berry bushes, strawberry patch, and container herb garden. This plan would make it less time consuming for me to water those areas.
We headed to the specialty store where we buy our drip system supplies and started discussing with them what sort of screens/filters we would need to use to be sure that dirt in the rain water didn’t get into the drip tubes and clog them. What we found out was that our plans are not going to work. The rain barrels are situated up a steep hill from the gardens they would water – about a 6 foot rise in elevation. But apparently that won’t be enough natural pressure for the drip lines to work well.
Scrap that plan.
So we will just continue to water those areas by hand from the rain barrels with a hose.
But, we did get the other new drip system run to the new Onion/Garlic patch, and the Apple Garden (previous onion/garlic patch). And we fixed up some things that we wanted to tweak with the old drip system in the veggie garden.
Because of the cold, we haven’t run water through it all yet to see if it works. But the preliminary installation is done and we are looking forward to having even more garden space on the convenient drip lines.
Chickens
Another meat chick died. It is crazy. We have now had 18 or 19 (I lost count) die out of 41 total. We have no idea what the deal is, but none of the 22 layer chicks have died – only the red rangers. Sigh.
We moved most of the chicks out of the brooders and into the barn with their heaters (none have died since the move). We left the 5 smallest meat chicks in the brooder for another week to hopefully catch up some in growth without having to share food with so many other chicks.
Mrs. Arable’s three chicks are doing well and we moved her and them down to the lower coop so we can see them and enjoy them near the house. I love watching a mama hen with her babies. So far it has been too cold and she hasn’t chosen to bring them outdoors. But as we have warmer days and they get bigger I expect her to bring them out to explore more.
Willow Creek Farm 
Drip irrigation in a vegetable garden can be more trouble than it is worth.
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In what way?
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It must be pulled up when the vegetables from one season are replaced with vegetables for the next season, and then if the emitters are not spaced properly, more must be added or modified, etc. Turkeys and other animals really do a bit of damage to them. Even if they do not eat the plants, they damage the water lines. Your garden must be quite efficient to use drip irrigation efficiently. My garden is not like that. We use drip irrigation in the nursery, but only for plants that do not move until they are done, and then get replaced with more of the same.
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That is interesting. I am not sure we use the same type of system as you because we don’t pull them up or change their spacing for different veggies. So I am wondering if we are talking about different types of systems. Ours stays where it is unless we need to add more compost to a box, in which case we just toss the drip line to the side (while it is still attached to the main line), add the compost to the box and rake it in, then grab the end of the drip line and lay it back where it goes. It doesn’t really take any more effort than not having the drip line there.
I can imagine that turkeys, chickens, etc can wreak havoc on a drip system, but we don’t let ours into our garden.
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We don’t let them in either. They just come in anyway. Nasty birds they are.
If you system stays intact, it would be more like what we use in the nursery, in which the spacing does not change (although we would use different emitters for cans rather than for things in the ground). Once a row (with four rows in each ‘row’) is mostly empties, I moved the leftovers aside, tossed the line aside, and raked the area before putting the line back in place. Nothing was changed. That system rocked, except it happened to get chewed by rabbits. (If it is not turkeys, it is rabbits.)
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I should emphasize that drip irrigation ‘CAN’ be more trouble than it is worth. That certainly does not mean that it always is more trouble than it is worth.
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