Saturday, July 24, 2010

The Plant Killer Strikes Again - Flooding

I am a one-person biblical disaster when it comes to the care and maintenance of plants. Lord help me if I ever have to depend on growing my own food! Due to ignorance, forgetfulness and / or the outcome of having a puce thumb, I seem to provide my poor plants with so many variants of plagues and wrath to have to survive. Only the heartiest plants can handle life in my garden!

Today was no exception. Poor plants. For the second year in a row we're having odd issues with our automatic sprinkler / irrigation system. It seems that my gardening efforts are fated to have mechanical problems! The sprinkler system goes off sporadically. Sometimes it stays on schedule to water every morning for 10 minutes, then suddenly it won't work for two weeks. It's set to go off early in the morning, so I don't always know if it's watered the garden or not. We have it set to drip irrigation, so you have to put your finger in the dirt to be certain it's been watered.

The system hasn't worked all week, and I've been running it manually, but not daily because I wanted to pare back the watering a bit anyway. I ran the water this morning for what I'd planned to be 10 minutes... then promptly forgot about it..... for AN HOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We'll see how my poor plants deal with the flooding. The good news is that the garden is set at the top of a hill, so it's not like the plants have to sit in puddles of standing water. I hope I haven't ruined the crop! The tomatoes were just really starting to boom.

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