Pumpitude For Your Rain Barrels

 

The Zen Koan for "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment...same thing" can be applied in my semi-retirement. "Chop Wood (From Fall to Mid-Spring) Pump Water (other times)."

 

I enjoy more unharried time, free from the dreariness of campus politics and trifling administrivia, to focus on three things: writing, teaching a single class, and working on our farm. All stimulate different parts of my being: they are intellectual pursuits, though one is more social  than the other two, and only one includes physical labor.

That labor need not be onerous, especially as one's body ages. Watering a big (5,000 sq. foot) garden takes about 40 gallons at least weekly, often more in on a high summer evening, just as the lightning bugs start their show. How to get that all from rain barrels far away? Drip irrigation works for big operations but costs a lot of money and is not portable. It may work for you. All you need is water uphill and fixed beds for the system.

Or carry water in buckets and cans, oh Enlightened Sage. Not me. I let a pump do that. You see the two types I've tried. Both have their advantages and shortcomings.

 

The green pump, a cheapie from Harbor Freight or Northern Tool (I forget), has become my favorite, even though I damaged it by letting it run dry. It still works but now I let the weight of water in the rain barrel do the work for the pump, by connecting barrel's spigot to the pump's inlet (I had to make a female-female connecting hose). This same technique can be used for our pressure washer. I mounted the transfer pump on a small piece of 2x6 treated wood to keep it level and off damp ground.

 

Transfer pumps tend to be lighter than the submersible black one, also a really cheap Northern Tool purchase. Both pumps have grown old and cranky as I am doing, likewise acting up at times, needing only a tap from a hammer to get them running. That may be my fate one day. Bonk bonk on the head.

 

But as I said, they are cheap pumps. Submersibles work great if the top of your barrel or cistern (ours is a copious 500 gallons) is not crisscrossed with bracing, as some of our barrels are, and (strongly recommended) you get a submersible with a float that will shut the pump off as soon as the water level falls too low (again, running dry burns out the pump motor in short order). We had a pump with float, a promising stainless steel model, but it's now at the scrap-dealer's pile. Also a cheap pump, it gave out after 2 or 3 years of powerful service. It never ran dry.

 

Why not buy a nicer pump? I will next time. $100 is not too much, even $200, for one that will last many many years with proper care. Or you can spend $40 to $75. Be sure you have a hammer handy. 

 

Which type of pump is for you? My hose runs 200' from the barrels to the garden, or from cistern to barrels uphill when we transfer water from deep storage. 

 

Unless a hose kinks, the water-flow is powerful and the source sustainable (we have a shallow well we don't use to irrigate. Rainwater only). I use the nozzle shown below to save water. It's a powerful jet nozzle (a tiny one) of solid brass. I can dial it to a stream or spray. The only issue involves debris that can clog the jet. When that happens, I crimp the hose (no 200' walk in July, please) and remove the nozzle and crank it fully open. I then visually inspect it and either puff up my cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie and blow out the debris, or I find a piece of straw from the garden mulch and clear the jam. 

 

Then I watch the plants grow. Now that's enlightenment, Grasshopper. Happy Gardening in 2025. 

 

Not a Drop to Drink: So Plan, Already!

Our well water is cloudy again, after rains that have turned the ground to pudding, at least at the top. Further down, it's frozen, a pleasant and, historically, seasonal surprise after so many disappointing, warm winters. If we get lucky (well, I love snow) we'll see a major snowstorm midweek here.

The issue with filtering our water is trivial; trees falling in wind are more serious, but so far things are happening away from the well-tending giants around our home. What falls back in the woods will be firewood for 2026.

I compare our lot to folks in the Richmond metro area who lost potable water for a week due to mismanagement and delayed maintenance at the treatment plant. This event made national news. Some people I talked to had pressure; others did not. None of the water was safe to drink. 

 There's not much to do if no water comes from the taps. You buy bottled water or, as one friend did, visit friends elsewhere. Others took short and unplanned winter holidays.

But were the water on, yet not potable, why not own an emergency filter? That's our plan and it's come in handy at least four times in almost as many years. I detest those awful iodine tablets, considering them some test of macho-hood for old-school campers. Technology has given us a better alternative.

We use a system very similar to Sawyer's product shown here. 

Before we have more emergencies that I'm sure are on the way in these troubled times, get one for your home. We are pricing solar and a whole-house generator for our farm, too. I can't run our generator until the snow or rain stops.

Urbanites and suburbanites may not need the big-dog chainsaw or even "the pee-wee" saw I use, but consider a basic hurricane emergency kit as well as two weeks of non-perishable food. You may not be able to leave home the next time trouble comes knocking. 

Creative Commons image from Pexels.

Of Desert Rats and Deep Time

Winter and now Spring flee before my calendar. Concurrently, my posts here have been a bit thin on the ground, as thin as trees in the high deserts of northern Arizona. 

We have been there for a short visit, one that somehow seems longer. I would love for time to always pass in this manner. My wife and I have a theory that when we travel, time slows down. We do not go fast enough for time-dilation to occur, except psychologically.

I also have a particular theory about this vacation. The desert itself has something to do with our altered sense of time’s passage. Without driving all that far in a rented Mustang convertible (highly recommended) we have seen many varied arid and semi-arid landscapes in just a few days. Save for the scarcity of water, one might not expect such diversity in the same state. We visited the Granite Dells near Prescott, the scrubby and arid grasslands around Williams, the magnificent rock temples of the Grand Canyon, the primordial landscape of Petrified Forest National Park, the Ponderosa Pine-Forest above Flagstaff, the red-rock coffee-pots, broken arrows, and Snoopy Rock (kinda-sorta) of Sedona.

I loved the Western desert the first time I saw it, outside Phoenix, going on 25 years ago. At that point, I was a young writing teacher with big ideas about a technological revolution in the classroom, at the annual meeting of the CCCC in Phoenix. Now I approach retirement having slowed, marveling at the haste and earnestness of that younger self. The revolution occurred and computing is ubiquitous. Students still struggle to make the transition to writing academic prose, albeit with more distractions and new sources of dopamine addiction. Sometimes the Internet, so wild a frontier in 97, seems a desert and not a majestic one.

Now where did a quarter-century fly off to?

This post cannot answer that, but in an odd manner, returning to the desert did.

We have met decidedly eccentric Arizonans who live under a vast sky with ravens, jackrabbits, Bighorn sheep (saw one!), elk, rattlesnakes, and coyotes. They (human and animal) know something the rest of us don’t. Arizona’s “desert rats” share some inside joke about how one lives in harmony in an unforgiving but majestic place, under all that sky.

Could I learn how to be in on their joke? I doubt it; I do not have enough decades left on this rock. Soon enough I was looking forward to going home, humidity and all. By the time we got to Sedona, our last stop, my favorite place was the Ace Hardware. I was looking forward to working in the garden and seeing the place we live. Something in me changed, and I didn't feel the "further" urge on my wanderlust 20s.

What did I learn? Watching how other visitors react interests me a great deal. Silence, often. Now past (thank God) a stage in my life where I condemned what Edward Abbey called “industrial tourists,” I instead enjoy talking to all sorts of folks on holiday. Even if their idea of paradise is a packaged resort somewhere, I get a window into their world.

Reactions to deserts particularly prove educational. Nan and I chase ghosts of Puebloan cultures while others rush through ancient homelands, pulling 40’ long RVs into fast-food places. I admit, their choices no longer disgust me, as they once did. I don’t even mind a McDonald’s cheeseburger from time to time, mostly for nostalgic reasons. Out of my own discomfort about time passing, I feel some empathy for those who want the security of hauling every conceivable item from home along. The desert unnerves me, just beyond the town limits. Night falls so fast and utterly. But it also draws me like a magnet. Was it Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom who told someone that he liked the Spanish Meseta because he thought that was what he looked like, inside?

The flat expanses between Flagstaff and Winslow (where you can indeed stand on a corner) might be an excuse to put the pedal down on I-40, since old 66 is gone, the ghost of the Mother Road buried under the new superslab. Yet even that open and ostensibly monotonous landscape holds old tales, even old civilizations.

Like the vanished swamps that became the Petrified Forest, the Pueblo ruins of the Sinaguan people teach lessons about time that can terrify or comfort. The night after visiting The Petrified Forest, where I actually had two mild bouts of vertigo because of the altitude as well as the distortion of distances, I could not go to sleep. I thought I was about to stop breathing. The vista of 230 million years of history makes one less than a speck on top of a speck.

Luckily, some saline spray to open desert-dry nostrils restored me.

At Walnut Canyon, one of the Park Service’s final sign boards notes how the Hopi and Navajo believe that “migration is not abandonment.” When life changed the Sinaguan people moved on. A theory holds that they merged with other local tribes, and some current traditions reach back, many centuries, to those old and sacred pueblos.

Compared to the mineralized tree-trunks two hours away, the Sinaguan people were here yesterday. One day something happened. We know a drought sizzled for five years, and dry-land farming cannot survive that. A Hopi man I met described his corn, beans, and squash farming. His photos revealed a very canny way to irrigate from saved water in the monsoon season and from snowfall.His son is working to teach young Hopi how to garden as their ancestors did, to insure food that is healthy and shares a spiritual connection to their ancestors.

That mission, not purported vortexes of energy above Sedona’s T-Shirt shops and celebrity mansions, sticks most with me. The Permian rock that looms above the town will see the Earth’s next Ice Age. We won’t likely be here then.

That continuity of growing food and remembering one’s ancestors may be all we can ask for.  Maybe, all we need.

Get busy with that.

Rain at Last!

One of the saddest facts about human-caused climate change is how easy it is, for urbanites and suburbanites, to ignore its effects on other living things. In Richmond, most folks seem to only notice our ever-more-common dry spells in early Fall when their monoculture lawns die off, or the city limits watering.

In the country, however, those not on deep wells began to fret this year about the time of our State Fair. That's usually when we get rains to break the dry, hot weather.

Not this year. Even our 2000 gallons of stored water did not seen likely to outlast this drought. As of last week, about half of that had been used for garden and perennials, plus some recently planted trees we were struggling to keep alive.

With a high-pressure system the size of a small nation parked over the East Coast, even tropical systems steered around it. That's a salutary side effect, with one aspect of climate change battling another. We living things, both animal and vegetable, got got caught in the middle of this clash of titans. And yet hardly a drop of rain fell in my part of Virginia for eight long weeks.

Now, thankfully, we have a real soaker, just in time to save the small trees that have been so stressed on our property. We've lost a few, but others we kept going with watering bags of various sorts.

I hope we see more rain like this, on and off and not in deluges, in 2020. This recent day of rain may have broken a pattern but it did not do more than dent the drought. I checked a six-acre field that I needs to till this weekend. Below an inch down, the soil seems as dry as the deserts of Mars. Yet there's more rain in the forecast for Sunday. Hope, unlike rain, does seem to come upon us through an act of will.

We need other changes, too, if we are to address climate change's pernicious and, ultimately, civilization-ending dark promise. Let's get busy on that and vote for sense. Virginia has an election in a month, an I plan to vote against the party of environmental destruction. I hope  you do, too.