Making it Rain

On Monday it was bone dry.

Laura and I were hoeing in the garden and there was a lot of dust getting kicked up. I needed some garlic for our lunch and tried to just pull one up and instead of it coming out of the ground, the stem just broke off. The ground was that hard and dry.

Tuesday morning we weeded the last bed of pumpkins and I watched as the newly weeded pumpkins curled up in the dry hot air, having lost their extra connections to the ground on the stem joints. We walked over to the potato patch and I was not thrilled to notice some browning on the leaves of some of the plants. It is early for blight, but we thought it might be heat stress or water stress.

Laura and I decided to mitigate the possible water stress by setting up the hoses and sprinklers. It took all of our hoses to reach to the end of the potato patch. And it took a good hour of work until we heard the sweet sound of the sprinkler. Tcha, Tcha, Tcha, Tcha, Tcha, Chachachacha. Repeat. We left for berry picking and when we got back I went to change the location and discovered that one of the hoses had broken where it had been repaired last week. For several hours it had discharged water at full blast down the black bean row - an experiment in flood-irrigation. Yikes. After new hoses were installed, soon we were back in beeswax. But we were looking at a couple days of non-stop watering and moving the hoses around to get all of the potatoes fully watered.

Then it started raining on Wednesday morning and did not stop for several hours. Then it rained again. And again. Until by the end of the day we had almost 4 inches of rain.

Okay. That is enough. Other places are in drought, but we have somehow had rain each time, just when we were about to really need it.

We have a theory. It is about cause and effect. The theory is that if you spend an excessive amount of time and/or money setting up an irrigation system, it is likely to rain the next day. It is sort of the same theory that I have in a restaurant when I am waiting for the food to come. If it is taking a long time, then all I have to do is get up to go to the bathroom and then the food comes while I am in the bathroom.

Anyway, farmers all around us can send their thanks to Laura and I for making it rain.