Most of us divide our lives into some sort of before and after: marriage, divorce, our first gray hair, the year our team finally won the championship. For Steadfast Spouse and me, this division is marked by the beginning of our water worries—or BWW and AWW.
Before we took up country living, Spouse and I lived in a pleasant condominium community on a charming little lake that had started life as a gravel pit. Our water worries never extended beyond a concern that our homeowner’s association seemed to waste a lot of it on a frequently malfunctioning irrigation system that tried hard to keep everyone’s lawn green during parts of the year when no lawn has a right or a reason to be green.
Most of us divide our lives into some sort of before and after: marriage, divorce, our first gray hair, the year our team finally won the championship. For Steadfast Spouse and me, this division is marked by the beginning of our water worries—or BWW and AWW.
Before we took up country living, Spouse and I lived in a pleasant condominium community on a charming little lake that had started life as a gravel pit. Our water worries never extended beyond a concern that our homeowner’s association seemed to waste a lot of it on a frequently malfunctioning irrigation system that tried hard to keep everyone’s lawn green during parts of the year when no lawn has a right or a reason to be green.
When we moved to our little farm, we gladly gave up lawns altogether. But we sat on pins and needles hoping the well driller would hit water before digging all the way to the planet’s molten core. Then we fretted further as we waited for our well sample to pass the county’s E. coli test. A few years later, we started commercial produce growing, and that’s when the AWW phase of our life began in earnest.
For farmers, water worries begin in winter, when we agonize about the snow pack. Will there be enough of it to replenish precious groundwater reserves? Will it melt slowly enough so as not to flood the creek banks and wash out the road or the bridge?
Then there are the spring rains, always equal parts blessing and curse. Too little rain, and tender new crops get off to a pitiful start in life. Too much, and soggy fields can’t be plowed or sown at all, putting the timing of the growing season at risk, and with it our income.
In dry summers (and almost all of them are anymore), we all pray for rain, but please, not on days when we take our crops to market. There’s not a more despondent gathering of souls anywhere than a bunch of farmers who’ve just shivered through a sudden July downpour, only to have to pack up soggy unsold goods and drag them all the way home again.
No one wants rain in fall, of course, unless you’re the kind of farmer who puts in cool weather crops, or gets tired of watching your cornfields catch fire, which would be most of us. That brings us back around to snow packs, but we think you get the picture by now.
Of all these water worries, summer and fall drought are at least somewhat amenable to intervention, so in year two AWW, Steadfast Spouse and I became devotees of primitive irrigation remedies. Garden hose is thankfully cheap, and given enough pressure at the well pump, does its job even when joined together to nearly astronomical lengths. We ran a lot of it from the house to the vegetable plots and cobbled on various salvaged sprinkler heads to do the rest.
What has really saved us, though, is mulch: many a small farmer’s ultimate miracle. We make a lot of it each year, thanks to plentiful fallen limbs and branches. Layered a few inches deep around the base of the plants, the mulch chips are soon joined together by strands of friendly fungi. In a matter of weeks, the whole system becomes a sort of communal sponge, keeping precious moisture right where it’s needed most. Why, if this stuff starts to work any better, we may find ourselves in year six AWW looking for a whole new kind of worry. But please don’t tell my fellow farmers—they may send us some of theirs. 
