blue2going

Before going to work today I'm going to have to go out and water the gardens. We were supposed to get some long-awaited rain last night but nothing came but a bit of lightening. The crops are so dry that farmers will be taking a big loss on then. If my Dad was still around and farming it would be a bad year for him. It's very difficult to work so hard and see it all go to ruin. That happened one time when I was a child and although it was a long time ago, I remember it all too well.

The problem wasn't from drought but from a late freeze that killed all the blossoms, blossoms that would have turned into that year's crops. We had to cut back and curtail many activities, we drank powdered milk instead of regular milk. My parents talked gloom and doom.

The next year they bought an irrigation system to protect against freezing. Wish I had some photos of it, it was so cool! In the spring the temperature would drop and we would be rousted out of bed to check the lines. Half asleep with flashlights in hand, we would walk the acreage checking to make sure all the sprinklers were working properly. Sometimes one would get hung up and only cover a small area, it had to be fixed or the uncovered area would freeze. We could tell by the sound of each sprinkler whether it was working properly or not.

But the most exciting of all were the blowouts which happened on a fairly regular basis. The pipes were all cleverly hooked together but an animal could knock the pipe so the side so when the system started up it would blow the pipe out. Gophers especially would tunnel under the ground pushing up dirt that would move a pipe just enough to cause a blowout. Finding a blowout was like seeing Old Faithful in the dark! It was a huge, shining column of water forcefully spewing up in the air.

"Blowout! Blowout!" We'd start screaming and running as fast as our little legs would take us. Every once in a while we'd stop, catch our breath and try to signal Dad with our flashlight. Who ever had found the blowout would soon start running into the other kids checking the lines (we were three) and they would join in the running and screaming. Finally my Dad would get the word by flashlight signal usually because he couldn't hear our screaming over the pump noise. The pump would stop, the sprinklers diminish into a quiet "ssssss" and there would be an unearthly silence while we all accompanied my Dad to the scene to assess the damage, four flashlights bobbing over the fields.

A blowout causes a lot of damage to the garden area around it; it blows out a huge hole and all the plants with it. My Dad would direct the relaying of the pipe, we'd check it quickly, and he'd go all the way back to start up the pump again to protect the crop. On some nights we would have several blowouts, so it was always exciting and very busy. Being kids we weren't even that tired the next day after being up all night long.

The irrigation system would probably not help much for this drought though. My Dad needed a permit to take water from the creek "crick" and later we built a beautiful pond for irrigation. The pond wasn't within view of the house, it was in the back 40, the front 40 acres were where our house and most of the garden fields were. The back 40 had some gardens but was and still is hunting land for my brothers. The creek is really low this year and the DNR wouldn't let anyone take irrigation water from it! The pond is low too and wouldn't supply much. I feel bad for all the poor farmers and their families, so much work and a looming loss this year.

From my E-mail:
Clever Puns

• Those who jump off a bridge in Paris are in Seine.
• A backward poet writes inverse.
• A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.
• A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
• Reading while sunbathing makes you well red.
• A bicycle can't stand on its own because it is two tired.
• Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
• A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.
• If you don't pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.
• When a clock is hungry, it goes back four seconds.
• The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered.
• He often broke into song because he couldn't find the key.
• A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.
• He had a photographic memory that was never developed
  

// posted by blue2go @ 6:16 AM