Posts Tagged water

Time to plant the tomatoes!

After we passed the mid-point of May, the pressure intensified at the farm.  Once we had eased past the threat of frost, we needed to plant summer crops: squash, cucumbers, onions, pepper, eggplant, and especially tomatoes.

At Dave’s farm, given the spread-out location of the fields, this meant that not only did we need to plant seedlings, but we also needed to lay mulch and drip irrigation lines.  These are, after all, crops that demand a great deal of water and care, and the heirloom tomatoes are especially precious to the farm’s bottom line.  Therefore, they merited all the extra effort we could give them.

The header line connects to the shut-off valve; the shut-off valve connects to the drip tape...

So, before I got down on my hands and knees to dig in, I helped Dave set up the irrigation lines.  He set the header line in place, turned on the water, and got it up to the right pressure.  Then, with the rows staked out, I grabbed one end of drip tape and walked to the end of the plot, adding an end cap to the line.  Dave poked the hole in the header line (getting a good soaking in the process), inserted the coupling for the drip line, and connected everything.  I straightened the line, anchoring it where needed, and moved on with him to the next line.

On days when the sun blazed down on us, laying drip lines actually made for a nice breather in between hot and sweaty planting sessions.  The water gushing out of the header lines tended to be hot, having soaked up the sun’s rays through black plastic all day, but it was a comfort to stand and be buffeted by the breezes once in a while.

Tomatoes in field #1, neatly mulched with black plastic

The mulch — be it mowed grass or sheets of black plastic — sometimes came before the drip lines.  The width of the plastic made an excellent indicator for where to lay the lines as well as for where to plant the tomatoes, though once I was ready to plant, the heat coming off the plastic made the task a little more challenging.  (The grass mulch, despite its lighter color, wasn’t much better: the drying grass caused a great deal of itching, and the light reflected off the mulch back in my face.  A no-win situation, it seemed.)

Tomatoes, as far as the eye can see...

In other areas, we laid lines and planted first, before mulching.  (It depended on weather, grass mowing schedules, and other tasks.)  And given the urgent need to get the seedlings planted, I set out tomatoes in all kinds of weather: hot and blazingly sunny, cool and mucky, and under the threat of an impending thunderstorm.  This field was finished just before the rain started — a good thing I have gotten much quicker and more efficient at planting!

I’ve also learned how to splice the drip tape in order to cut out a pinhole leak (detrimental to the pressure on down the line) and reconnect the tape pieces, and I’m (slowly) learning to be more careful when planting so that I don’t cover the emitters (the holes in the drip tape) with soil or mud, thus clogging them.  Details!

One more patch remains to be filled with tomatoes, and then we’re done with that task.  Not all the seedlings will find a home in the fields since we are running out of room.  And once we get the remaining summer crops planted — more squash, a plot of peppers, melons, onions — we’ll return to the tomatoes for trellising.

The rain moved in mid-week, so we may not have heavy use of the irrigation system just yet.  But we’re ready to keep the water flowing when needed.