But How will we water it?

In our homeschooling, we are working on learning a bit about the water cycle. You might remember the old kids hand-motion that show evaporation, condensation and precipitation. As we are learning away, making references to our new garden and delineating what is needed for vegetables to grow, my kids said, quite astutely, “so we have soil, and sunlight and we will be putting plants in there soon..but how will we water it?”

It sounds like a silly question because we could simply water them with the hose or with a watering can. However, as the kids quite brilliantly pointed out, we have quite a long distance from the hose to the garden and it turns out carrying watering cans back and forth with water is actually pretty heavy, tedious and time consuming. So we had to do a bit of leg work to get the garden functioning well.

Last year, when we had a contractor come out and tell us where a good spot for a garden is he also mentioned that we could probably put another line into our sprinkler system that would reach this area. We have a sprinkler system that covers our property but it doesn’t stretch as far out as the raised beds. So we had the sprinkler system people come and lay another line out to the garden. Additionally, they put a copper water spout so that we can keep a watering can right next to the garden and water the plants as needed without the trek back and forth.

There is something really amazing about how much planning it takes to create something so very simple. One of the few silver linings of this pandemic is that we would not have had the time to invest in this adventure otherwise. It is truly amazing to see the intentionality with which we are able to lay the groundwork for a successful garden. So far, it is working brilliantly — now for getting the plants in there so we can have a truly functioning garden! Stay tuned.