The August heat was brutal—not on us, we can always sit in the shade and drink iced tea or retreat to the house, but brutal on the garden.
As we dug in the dirt last weekend, preparing for fall, we looked in horror at the parched, dry dirt just below the surface that we had been so dutifully watering. It was a veritable Sahara Desert, I tell you. Clearly the soaker hose didn’t soak as much as we thought it had.
So on Saturday we cast our dollars to the wind and bought Submatic pipe and fittings and filters and valves and constructed a drip irrigation system for out two most-abused square foot garden beds.
We sat in the heat and cut the pipe and pushed the reluctant parts together. We cut up pieces of an old scrounged hose to connect one bed to the next. And in the full southern sun of afternoon, we installed the emitters, turned on the water and watched as the first drips dripped.
We stood beside the beds covered in dirt and sweat, smiling and congratulating ourselves, wondering silently how it could have possibly taken us so long.
And today?
Today we’ve had torrential rains as what’s left of Hurricane Hermine passes west of us, swinging her great counter-clockwise spinning arms overhead. Since last night to this very moment, it has been a deluge with more water falling from the sky in the course of 12 hours than we had all summer long.
I guess we’ll test out the drip irrigation system later.