Orchard 4: Watering

The most time-consuming orchard maintenance, at least during the dry months of July, August, and September (and sometimes June and October), is irrigation. We use groundwater that is pumped from the orchard well to a series of hose bibs (raised faucets) on the north side of the orchard.

Map of orchard (2010), with irrigation stuff in blue.

The three eastern hose bibs.

The hose bibs were the only existing irrigation components: no sprinklers, drip lines, etc. leading to individual trees. The previous owner had used hoses and bubblers, which he left behind. We used them in the summer of 2010.

This one is too close to the trunk. The small gray building is the well hut.

Two bubblers on adjacent trees.

This system was pretty inefficient and very time-consuming: In order to wet all, or even most of, the root zone, we had to move the bubbler to three or four positions per tree. We had a lot of bubblers, but water pressure was sufficient to run only 3 or 4 at a time (sometimes only 2). And the whole ungainly system had to be moved to the next row of trees.

You might think that I would have made installation of an irrigation system (pipes, drip, sprinklers, timers, etc.) a very high priority. I didn’t—I’m waiting until the orchard design is more settled. I’ve planted dozens of new trees and pulled several existing ones, and will be doing more of that in the coming months, and I don’t want to waste money or time on a system that would need to be re-done or modified.

To water the orchard in the summers of 2011 and 2012, I retired the bubblers and simply hand-watered with hoses. I know it looked labor-intensive to my neighbors, and I suppose it was, but it actually saved time and labor compared to the bubbler technique. I usually ran two hoses at the same time: I would set hose 1, walk to hose 2 and set it, and walk back to hose 1 to re-set it. Repeat as needed. I got good as separating the 2 hoses by a 30-second walk, so that I often just kept walking with no down time (over 2 miles every hour!).

Other times there was enough waiting time that I could catch up on some reading (albeit a paragraph at a time). Several times I took out a folding chair, and twice I cut my hair!

I calibrated the flow so that it was about 4 gallons/minute. As with the bubblers, I watered several spots around each tree in order to wet most of the root zone. Very small trees get 3 spots (12 gallons total); small ones get 4 (16 gal), and larger ones 5 (20 gal) or even 6 (24 gal).

Young trees have fairly shallow root systems, so they need to be watered at least every week in the dry, warm summer—though not too deeply. As trees and their root systems grow, watering needs change:
* a larger diameter needs to be watered.
* deeper watering is needed
* watering is needed less frequently
By 2012, the 6-year-old filberts were getting 20-25 gallons every 12-14 days, and they did fine.

An extremely important, often overlooked benefit of hand-watering is that I “spend quality time” with every tree on a regular basis. If I had a REAL irrigation system, with electric timers controlling a buried system of sprinklers and/or drip lines, I’d never have to visit my trees, and could just loll around eating bonbons and drinking mint juleps, or whatever. The seemingly labor-intensive technique I use means that I’m much more likely to quickly catch problems like pests, gopher activity, disease outbreaks, etc.—particularly important with such young trees. As time passes and trees mature, that won’t be so important, and I’ll finally install some sort of irrigation system.