Watering the Garden

This is my third year volunteering with the Learning Garden, and it's interesting to reflect on how the process of keeping our vegetables alive and flourishing through the inevitable hot and dry spells of summer in Central Pennsylvania has changed. That first year, and it was a very dry one, we filled up buckets at the outside faucet of our hosts, American Legion Post 444, and carried them to the Garden where we filled watering cans and individually watered each plant. Finding the actual plant amidst the 2-foot-high winter squash vines was quite a challenge!

About half way through that summer, I got the idea of using old cat litter buckets, which came with lids, so I could fill up a bunch of them at a time and carry them across the parking lot in the back of my Subaru. Then, near the end of the season, my sympathetic husband spotted a bunch of heavy duty hoses on sale and donated them to the cause.

Those hoses, also hooked up to the Legion's faucet, were a big improvement, but it still took a single person over 2 hours to thoroughly water what is an awfully big space. No one was too keen on using a sprinkler, since we all knew that it wasn't the most efficient use of the water we were already reluctantly taking from the municipal water source (at the Legion's cost), but we may have come to that had we not gotten wind of a grant the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection was offering for Environmental Education.

What a perfect opportunity for our little Learning Garden! We had a super set-up for collecting rain water, with multiple buildings around us, including the Millheim Market's pavilion right next door. But a better choice was the Legion's large storage shed sitting on the slope above the Garden. That made it possible to use nothing but gravity to get the harvested water to the thirsty plants using a drip irrigation system to place the right amount of water exactly where the plants like it.

Since our mission is to Share Skills as well as grow food and build community, we wrote up the grant application and were pleased to be awarded this opportunity to show how a reasonable up-front investment in time and money could conserve drinking water (and save the money that drinking water costs!) as well as save time.

It's been a busy year since we first got the grant. Last fall, when we had hoped to get the majority of the work done, was rainy. This spring we divided our efforts between the drip irrigation project and expanding the Garden monumentally with a Forest Garden above and an Herb Garden below the original plot.

The deadline to have all the work done is today, and I'm happy to report that we squeaked under the finish line. We've been using the system for a number of weeks now, and it is fantastic! We're getting enough rain to keep the 1,100 tank filled most of the way, and how nice it is to be able to just turn the valve and do other necessary chores while the watering happens.

Today we will celebrate the completion of the system, and I hope you'll all come out and see how easy it is to be water-smart. Warren, who designed the system and led the charge of installing it all, will be conducting a tour at 11:30. We'll also be including a number of related Garden Talks and other programs from now on, so if you can't make it today, there will be ample opportunities to learn in the coming months and years.