Spring Was Busy

Reader Contribution by Nebraska Dave
Published on June 24, 2016
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This spring has been a busy one with great accomplishments. March was the beginning of the outside gardening with working on the spring platform. That effort has since been transferred over to the issue of watering the plants and keeping them alive. We are now in the throes of a hot dry spell. We have had very little rain in the month of June. Barely 2 inches of the over 4 that we normally average. The temperatures are in the 90s and approaching 100 degrees more days then not. I like to be in Terra Nova Gardens, a 20 minute drive from where I live, by 5:45 a.m. just as the sun is rising up over the trees. Terra Nova Gardens has clear sunshine from sunrise to about 2:30 in the afternoon. Then the shadow from the steep hill to the west of the garden begins to creep across the the garden. By 4:00 p.m. the garden is in full shadow mode. I’ve always considered that shaded afternoon a plus especially this year with the extreme heat.

I’m one step closer to irrigation for Terra Nova Gardens.

The natural spring on Terra Nova Gardens property is a mucky sticky silt that is difficult to dig out. I have a source of free barrels of practically any size. This is a 55 gallon barrel that I cut the bottom out and set in the spring. Then a post hole digger was used to remove the muck from inside the barrel. As the muck is removed the barrel was pushed deeper and deeper into the spring. Here you can see that it’s set about 2/3 of the way down in the spring. Since this picture a few more inches have been removed and the barrel is set lower. The hope is to get the full barrel down into the spring. Right now I can remove about 40 gallons of water with a pump into a mini water tower in the middle of the garden. Hopefully, by summer’s end, two more barrels will be sunk into the spring giving me a total of about 150 gallons of water ready to fill the mini tower.

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