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“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson

Monday, April 27, 2009

Watering the Garden

This year our garden is much larger than years past so we have been presented with a problem in irrigating it. We traditionally water the garden from the rain barrels or the pond. As the garden has been planted this has presented a problem, watering takes up a lot of time. Currently with both my daughter and it watering it takes about 45 minutes to get everything watered and we are still planting. So what are we to do? We still want to use the pond water and rain barrels until we absolutely have to use county water. Well, we have a huge supply of bamboo. In fact I built new tomato cages (still building) with it. The great thing about bamboo is that if hollowed out with a piece of rebar while green it makes a fabulous tube. We can use the bamboo to water the garden! We will take about a 3 foot piece of hollowed out bamboo and in each row will stake pieces about 2 feet apart. Then we can simply fill up the tube of bamboo with water and the water will seep into the ground near the roots where it is needed instead of running all over the top before it seeps into the dirt. We can use the old milk jugs to simply keep the bamboo tubes filled with rain water. I hope it works and will update you with our success or failure. I think this will greatly conserve our water supply while delivering valuable water to the roots of our veggies. It should also cut down tremendously on our time watering also. I sure hope this works!

2 comments:

Kate said...

I would love to see a picture of your garden if you're able. I'm still working on mine as a first timer.
I have no access to bamboo that I had hoped to find on our rural property out in Osage to use as stakes for tomatoes, etc., but it's been proven to be far too dry an area for items like that though there are the most beautiful flat rocks I've seen in a long time. Landscapers and city folk would pay a pretty penny for rocks like this in their yards and gardens. Ok.. I'm off topic!
What if you were able to put your rain barrel close to the garden and feed the hollowed bamboo in such a way that gravity would pull the water from the barrel to your plants?? I'm sure you have thought of that and are doing something similar or better.
Happy gardening!
~Kate

Kat said...

yes it would be wonderful to rig up the rin barrel to automatically water the garden. I don't see that happening anytime soon. But now that you have planted the idea might be something we start thinking about trying to do! Blessings, Kat