Or: how to keep your garden from dying of thirst when your nearest water source is a leechy pond 500m away through the woods and down a hill.
Cooter Hollow is host, more or less*, to two vegetable gardens this summer (* more on the second garden in a while). This, in itself, fairly ambitious. The fact that neither garden has a reliable source of running water elevates this from “ambitious” to “idiotic.” But I do idiotic better than just about anybody.
The upper garden (the smaller of the two, with not a whole lot of sun and not much cleared land, but enough for an asparagus patch, tomatoes, brussels sprouts, various greens and herbs and daily yums) is fed by the leechy pond, which is a trek. Before the MudDood came about, this was watered by filling old milk jugs and hauling them by hand. Which is so ballbreakingly grueling that I can’t even crack a joke, for fear you’ll forget to express deep pity for my ordeal.
But then the MudDood entered our lives, and then S. got clever and rigged me up a system.
You know, I’m pretty bright, as far as people go, but as a lifelong autodidact/autoidiot, there are admittedly these few gaping festering pustules in my areas of knowledge. Of these, a particularly infected one has to do with mechanical/electrical systems. My experience with this stuff is by proxy of fiction: the sausage-making machine in Olesha’s Envy, the mechanics of the Airship in Against the Day, Tesla’s creations as interpreted by Pynchon (again in AtD) or Auster (ergh) or Jacek Dukaj or jesus, just about anybody and damn, Tesla’s become a trope. Giant booknerd, pathetic engineer, but I know an awful lot of made-up shit about Tesla. Which didn’t really help in the effort of not killing our garden.
Fortunately, I’m shacked up with someone who pays attention to how things work even when they’re not made of pulp or pixels.
Here’s what he did (disclaimer: I’m sure I’ll get something wrong, then he’ll upbraid me, then I’ll hang my head and write a shameful correction post. Then he’ll accuse me of hyperbolics but still won’t issue an actual correction. So we’re going to pretend that this is right. And that the garden is growing in a field of Tesla coils.
Let’s try this again: here’s what he did.
He bought:
- a FIMCO (made in USA!! Proudly!) fertilizer sprayer (17-gallon capacity)
- a little pump of some water-sucking sort
- a couple of battery clamps (connectors, maybe? Cables? Battery Cables, that must be it)
And we had:
- a battery (the kind you buy at the auto parts store, not the kind you buy at the supermarket)
- a spare chunk of pink insulating foam, or a similar floaty device
- a good length of garden hose
You see where this is going? No? Thank god, because neither did I, really, and you just made my ego’s lips finally stop trembling. But the short of it is: fill the 17-gallon fertilizer tank with water from the leechy pond, hook the sprayer up to your battery, and go bring forth new vegetative life.
When you need to fill your tank, load it all on your MudDood, drive it to the leechy pond. Affix your floaty stuff to the little pump so that you can just chuck it in the pond and run the hose from the pump to the empty tank. Plug the pump into the battery and go catch frogs for ten minutes or so while it fills. Careful not to get any leeches on you.
Optional step: be really bad at figuring out how to use the MudDood’s elastic tie-downs with anything resembling efficacy, such that upon driving back to Cooter Hollow base camp, everything sloshes all over the place and the now full (heavy) tank smashes into the pump. The pump is unharmed, thanks to the foam insulation surrounding it, which itself is now in two pieces. Add this anecdote to an internet blogh so that you don’t have to tell your boyfriend about it while he’s out of town at work. Think about whether you have the tools or skills to fashion up another foam floaty. You just might. You’ve got plenty of foam, after all, and it’s just a square piece with a circle cut out, right? Couldn’t have taken him longer than ten minutes, right? Decide that there’s no way you’ll pull that off, especially now that you’ve posted it to an internet site where he’s just about the only reader. Cop the fuck out.
In any event, when I’m not busy breaking shit, it’s surprisingly elegant as far as these things go, doesn’t tax a water supply or use too much juice (we charge the battery with a solar charger, unless I forget to plug it in, at which point we do have to bring the generator into the murky picture), and as far as I know, the pump hasn’t sucked in any leeches yet. If it has, I don’t think crispy arugula is a preferred host, so I suppose they’d bake in the sun and become compost? S, however, is a leechless wonder who deserves to be preserved and regaled as a novelistic trope for the sheer fecundity of his inventiveness.