Waterworks

I have mentioned before that A. is not into gardening. He doesn't like fussing around with plants, transplanting and weeding and hilling and top dressing with compost and all the other million and one things that go into raising plants that will produce food. Except for a little bit of assistance in spading up the beds and harvesting potatoes (the man's got impressive shoveling skills), he stays out of the garden.

Except on Sunday, he discovered the joys of irrigation.

This is nothing more than a very large boy playing in the dirt.

After planting Hubbard squash, summer squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, green beans, parsley, and dill, I went inside to do the dishes, and A. went down to the beach to start the water pump. Next thing I know, he's out there in the garden, wandering around digging trenches with the hoe and flooding the plants with water. I ran out to supervise, knowing his tendency to get a little carried away with his projects, to the detriment of the environment around him. Since the environment around him this time included my precious baby plants, I raced out to make sure he wasn't going to wash them away, or step on them with his huge boots, or destroy them with the hoe. Or something.

See, we don't have a garden hose hooked up to the house water system. Which means that watering the plants involves literally carrying all the water from the cistern or the rain barrels to the garden. It's a bitch, and I hate doing it. Unfortunately, our summers are generally pretty dry. Last year was an exception, which is why everything produced crazy harvests and I ended up singing Tom Petty songs while I lost my mind (and gallons of sweat) canning the ridiculous number of tomatoes the rain-soaked plants produced.

I guess A. likes the Tomato Crazy, because he was determined to find a way to water the garden with the lake pump. The lake pump pumps out a lot more water than your average garden hose. You can't just train the flow of water onto the plants; they would wash away. So instead, he dug a trench along the sides of the garden, and then used the hoe to carve out some more trenches nearer the plants so the water would flow in between them. It worked really well. And A. was SO HAPPY wandering around with the hoe, digging this trench a little deeper, filling that one in to reduce the flow to this particular plant. He hasn't had so much fun in a long time.

Admit it--this is pretty cool.

This is apparently how the date groves are watered in Saudi Arabia, where A. lived when he was young. It appears that young A. soaked up (geddit? soaked? HAAA) some lessons in irrigation during these formative years. So I predict that A. will be taking much more of an interest in the vegetable garden this year. At least as long as he gets to construct tunnels and dams in it.

Boys.