We finally have running water in the field at Aurelia’s Garden, our food pantry donation project. We made it through a couple dry weeks maintaining our newly planted seedlings by slogging water in buckets from the nearby swamp. It’s a big relief to turn on the pump and have plenty of water pumped to our plants.

The system has large (2 inch) feeder lines, all sorts of connectors and valves running into plastic drip tape. We can run any set of lines at one time. It’s a low pressure system run by a 164 gpm Honda Water Pump (a 4-cycle gas engine). We pump water from a river (more like a swamp, ha!) several hundred feet away from the field. The water goes through several filters and it comes out surprisingly clean.

I’ve been wondering if this commercial irrigation system would work on my vegetable garden at home. Maybe the big lines would be overkill. I water my garden with town water, but it is very close to a pond. Also I water from above with sprinklers and it would be so much healthier for the plants to water them from below with drip lines. Hmmm. Something for me to think about.