We ran into a little glitch on Wednesday when we tried to irrigate a new planting of lettuce—the sprinklers never came up to pressure. The well at our home farm is very shallow and very old and we’ve known for the past year or so that it was failing. We are on the waiting list to have a deeper well dug, but with the high demand for wells right now, we’ve got another 6-7 months before that happens. We were hoping to squeak through the year, but apparently that’s not going to happen.
Steve quickly contacted the managers of the neighboring farms and arranged to tie our irrigation system into theirs. We lease several acres from the Santa Cruz Land Trust, who now owns the neighboring property. They lease of the property to Reiter Berries who subleases to Lakeside Organics, and they already have systems in place for separating different parts of that 350 acre farm and dividing the water bills among the users. We just had to trench across our driveway to tie into their mainline irrigation piping.
With crops in the ground this had to happen fast and it did! Steve hired a backhoe operator and by Saturday morning they had connected the new pipes and we were able to water several of our fields at once. This is going to make things much easier for us. With our well, the pressure had decreased so much that we had been down to being able to water only a couple of lines of sprinklers at a time. We can only get a few irrigation “sets” in per day, and had to water constantly to try to get water to every part of the farm that needed it.
In the end the crisis turned out as well as we could have wished, and we’re grateful to the neighboring farmers and landowner for helping us out of this bind. Now we can focus on getting our backlog of starts from the greenhouse into the ground without worrying about whether we’ll be able to water them!
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