Water

I grew up in Seattle, where water was a way of life. It surrounded the city and fell from the sky. We mostly ignored it, unless we were actively trying discourage people from moving to the area. Then we exaggerated it. But even when the clouds cleared, it was the view of frozen water on the mountains that took our breath away.

It wasn’t until I began farming that water became a matter of survival. My first garden was two acres of vegetable in the high desert along the California and Nevada. There, we didn’t wait for water, we just pumped it furiously from the aquifer below our valley. It rained three times in the two years I was there.

My first summer in the Midwest I worked on the Potato Breeding Station in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. I quickly became the head irrigator, maintaining miles of four-inch aluminum pipe in twenty foot lengths, getting up at two in the morning to turn on the traveling irrigation gun. The following year, 1993, I signed on at Harmony Valley Farm in Wisconsin, a large organic vegetable farm. I started with an extra fifty cents an hour wage to account for my irrigation experience. It rained the entire summer. The Mississippi flooded. My boss threatened to garnish my wages if I didn’t stop doing such a good job of keeping things wet.

Our first year at Rock Spring Farm, after hand-watering some 2000 transplants, Kim and I ordered an irrigation system. The day it arrived we received three inches of rain. A week later we received another three inches, the beaver dam washed away, and our fields stood under water. A neighbor stopped by to ask me to turn it off.

As members of the farming community, we do have a certain obligation to complain about the weather. After all, it’s always too hot except when it’s too cold, and it’s always too dry, except when it’s raining. But this spring, such as it is, has certainly given us some cause for complaining. We’ve never been in the field this late – it’s May, for goodness sake, and we still haven’t been able to till in the fields! – but we know that spring will come sooner or later.