Starting this journey was no easy task.
After getting a late start due to the unusual weather in June, our plants arrived from the green house and sat idle for a week, some even longer, as we waited to get a well drilled for irrigation.
Everything was just happening so fast!
We got our well drilled (or so we thought) and started planting. They got the main irrigation lines all hooked up and ready to go only to find out that our well did not produce enough water for our needs.
Another set back. A second well. And a DRY hole.
You can imagine our despair.
To make matters worse, we had 8000 plants that needed water. Yep, you guessed it, for the next 3 days we ended up HAND watering those 8000 plants with 5 gallon buckets that we carried out to the field.
Exhausted, HOT and about to throw in the towel, the idea of having water hauled in popped into my head. I remembered our old high school bus driver, Paul, has a semi truck water tanker that he uses to fill swimming pools. We called him up and just like that we had a tanker filled with fresh well water that we hooked up to our existing irrigation system and watered our plants. 11,000 gallons in truck loads from our neighbor's farm irrigation well bought us the time we needed while waiting for our third well to be drilled.
This time … we dowse
This time before we drilled, we hired two old timers to dowse for water. We just could not endure another blow. We decided to go with our long time friend Earl, a local farmer. He found what he thought were two very good areas with wide flow lines.
He even handed me his rods and I gave dowsing a try. Whoa … they came back and hit me right in the chest.
My dad, son and his girlfriend all tried their hands at dowsing, not only did we all have it in us to dowse but we ALL hit hard on both areas.
I still have those rods, made out of metal coat hangers. I was so excited to keep them. They were life savers. They saved our field.
He noted that not everyone has the capability to dowse for water.
I was beyond excited that I could.
Needless to say we found water and enough water to irrigate our fields.
I was one happy “ lucky lady” standing at the back of the well drilling rig with beautiful fresh flowing water from this beautiful earth of ours.
Now it was time to finish planting the rest of our plants, better late than never and so the story goes. Now we get the joy of watching them grow into beautiful flourishing green plants.
Nothing in life is easy and nothing worth having is free ...