I wish this was a nice how-to post about how to have a good irrigation system. But it’s not. The biggest problem and workload in the garden is the irrigation right now. If anything is going to get watered, I have to do it. And I’m not doing so hot. Lots of things are drying up. The rainy month of May has turned into a normal hot, dry June. And the plants aren’t loving it.

Part of the reason the irrigation is so off is we have a weekly old-school water turn. I would like to irrigate just off of the water turn. Some places flood fairly well. The swales aren’t too bad. What remains are a bunch of areas that I’ve currently been watering with milk jugs turned into drip emitters. It actually doesn’t work that bad, but I just have too much to water. Over an hour twice a week of hand watering is not pleasant.

I still have no idea what I’m going to do everywhere…but if I don’t figure it out, I’m not going to have a great garden. I think the first (and easiest) step is to just go put some more mulch on everything. I’ve even got a big pile of straw that needs to be used.

Picture updates:


This is my inter-planted spring crop. Doing okay, I’ve had tons of lettuce out of there, as much as I’ve wanted. I could have been picking more. There are a few beets and carrots that look good in there…nothing has germinated in my straw bale gardens, so I think I will be planting something new there.

I watched this video about planting potatoes…and thought I would go for it. It was easy and turned out successfully (well, judging by the plants, but I assume I’ll get potatoes as well). I just threw the potatoes on the ground and buried with straw. I didn’t dig in the soil at all. They are interplanted with some onions.

The herb spiral looks great…only wish I would have actually planned out the herbs better instead of just filling it with what I had.

Swale mounds are planted up with veggies. Hard to tell in this picture. Some are doing well, some need more water. Next time, I would have planted everything close to the water line–the tops of the mounds get pretty dry. I seeded some things in. They weren’t marked, which was a mistake, because I haven’t been able to watch them to make sure they didn’t get buried in mulch and they were watered well. I don’t know if I will ever seed straight into a chop-and-drop cover crop again, but if I did, it would need to be marked!

Everything is going alright in the garden. I’ve realized I’m experimenting a lot (about everything is non-traditional) and really learning a lot from doing so. But I should have done some of the garden normal too. Then I could compare to my experiments, and also so if the experiments fail (which is fine, learning comes as much from failure as success), I would still have some produce to eat.

You know if nothing works out this year, at least I have learned a ton!