The little pump that couldn't....

 I've had four 55 gallon plastic rain barrels sitting full of water for several years now.  Three of them are full of water even now in late summer because, well, I don't have a good way to get the water out.  There's not much point in having rain barrels that you can fill up, but that you can't empty!

I do have a plastic hand pump that I can use to get the water started, but the threads on the pump are unknown to me - they certainly aren't the same thread that's on a garden hose.  So I end up just pumping the water out into a 5 gallon bucket and carrying it out to the flower beds.  Good exercise I guess, but honestly, I'm not as tough as my 80+ year old mother who still works like she's in her 30s!

So I got the bright idea that I'd get me a good pump this summer and actually use that water on the front flowerbeds.  As always, I turned to the all-knowing "The Google" to help me find something.  Here's what it came up with.

I was pretty excited that it said the threads on the pump would accept a standard garden hose, and $17.99 didn't seem like too bad of a price, especially when you got free shipping.  So I decided to just go ahead and order one.

After some unexplained delays in shipping, the little pump finally arrived.  It seemed like it was well made and I was excited to be able to finally use the rain barrels!  I took the little pump out that same evening, threaded it into the top of one of my barrels, assembled the pump handle and hooked up the garden hose.

But wait...something wasn't quite right.  The hose didn't seem to want to tighten up on the pump.  It appeared to thread on, but when it got to the end where it should be tight, POP! It was loose again.  

Maybe it just needed a different washer.  I tried a new washer, tried double-stacked washers, and still, the same result.  POP! 

Well, it would probably work even it if was slightly loose, I thought, so I snugged the hose right up to the popping point, then pumped the lever to get the water flowing.  I walked out to the end of the 100 ft. hose...nothing.  Back to the barrel, a few more pumps, and back to the end of the hose.  Nothing.

By that time, I was beginning to feel a bit more than aggravated.  I gave the pump handle about two dozen good pumps, and that time, I did get water out the end of the hose.  Seemed like it was going to work.  Happy dance!  

But within about five minutes the water slowed to a trickle and then stopped.  What I finally figured out is that without a good tight seal at the pump, air was being drawn into the hose causing it to lose prime.  I could get it going by pumping, but the result was always the same...water ran out at first, but got slower and slower then stopped.

The lower the water got in the barrel, the shorter time between when I got it going and when it stopped.  Why was that?  Well, it's PHYSICS, I finally told my dumb ol' self.  The water is having to travel UP the length of the pump before it makes its turn back down to flow out the hose.  When the barrel is full, there's lots of pressure on top helping force it up into the pump (since water weights about 8 lbs/gallon, that's 55 x 8 or 440lbs of pressure, right?).  But the lower the water gets, the less pressure there is to help out, and with the air leak at the hose connection, the gravity just can't maintain enough negative pressure inside the hose to keep it going.

Sadly, the little metal pump turned out to be a bust.  Back to square one.

Or perhaps I should say on to square two.  I read a bit and shopped around some more, and finally settled on this brass rain barrel spigot from Amazon.  I'll have to drill a hole in the bottom of my barrel, and will have to use my electrical fish tape to get the inside fitting down into the barrel, but no more pumping...just connect the hose, open the spigot, and let gravity do the rest!

But first, I guess I need to to make sure the hose threads onto the spigot.....

The end of summer

The garden is tired.

Even though there has been rain in our part of Arkansas during July and August, we've gotten very little of it.  We are in a location where the clouds often seem to "split," bringing rain to our south or to our east, but dropping just a few sprinkles on us.  Temperatures have been in the mid- to upper-90s for almost the entire time.  The sun beats down day after day after day, literally baking everything.  The dirt is dry and hard, even under the straw mulch.  

Emerald Giant bell pepper plant suffering
in the hot dry conditions.

Without water, the garden isn't going to survive for long. 

But in this heat, it doesn't seem to matter how much you try to water things.  I almost emptied a 55 gallon rain barrel one evening putting water on the bell pepper plants trying to save them.  After another day in the heat, I could hardly tell I had watered them at all. 

I've hooked up the garden hose to the "city water," and tried soaking the ground around the plants that are still producing.  I can't help but feel guilty watering that way.  It seems a real shame to take potable water and just empty it onto the ground.

And the hard truth is you just can't water everything. 

As I told my sister one day, you just have to pick and choose what you're want to try to save. And even then, the plants you try to keep watered might live, and they might not.  

As I sit here typing up this post, I'm watching The Weather Channel coverage of hurricane Ida as it moves inland in Louisiana.  It's hard to even comprehend how much water will fall from that storm, and it's really sad that so many people are at risk of losing their homes and possibly even their lives.  At the same time the people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are going to see up to two feet of rain, there are people in the western United States who are fleeing uncontrolled wildfires, desperate for just a little rain to slow the fires.  

So even though it's been a hot dry summer for us, I can count us in with the fortunate ones who are only a little inconvenienced by the weather.  The peppers may not make it through the summer, but hopefully I'll be around to try again next year.

A cool gust of air just came in through the open window and I hear thunder to our north.  Maybe Ida is bringing us some rain too.

The calendar tells me that summer is coming to an end. 

Fall will come, bringing with it cooler temperatures and (normally) more rain.  I think I'm ready for the change in season.  Maybe I won't feel quite so cranky.

Climate.gov precipitation outlook for September shows that we should be slightly wetter than normal.
Image courtesy of https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/data-snapshots/start.

Oh sweet Kandy Korn....

One of the things we always try to grow in the garden is sweet corn.  We've tried Merit, Peaches and Cream, Honey Select, but always seem to come back to Kandy Korn.

This year, I had "garden fever" pretty bad...maybe it pandemic burnout, or maybe it was the very uncharacteristic cold spell we had in February that brought sub-zero temperatures and left several inches of snow on the ground for about a week.  

Whatever, the reason, I could hardly wait to get started, but the weather didn't want to cooperate, so I had to wait until the ground was dry enough to break with the tiller to get started.  We finally got a short window of dry weather in late April, and although the dirt really was still a little too wet, with more rain in the forecast, I went ahead and tilled the garden and planted the corn, beans, peas and okra.

And rain it did.  I think in that next week we got over four inches of rain, and although the seeds started coming up, some must have rotted because there were gaps in the rows.  The little plants at the south end of the rows stood in water for several days.

While the things I had planted were weak and yellow, the clouds and soggy dirt doesn't seem to bother crab grass, Bermuda grass or the other assorted weeds that had survived the tiller.  (I actually think most of them survived...because it rained the very next day, I am pretty sure all I did was transplant them from their original spot to a new place in the row.)  By the time the corn was about two weeks old, the situation was starting to look pretty out of hand.  I took the hoe to it, working through one row every evening after work and  finally made it through all six rows except for the south end of the first two rows, which were still just too wet.  I tried transplanting some of the corn from where it needed to be thinned, moving it into gaps in the row.  Some made it, some didn't.  But after the grass was out of the rows, I felt a bit more hopeful.

Still, the corn just didn't grow like I thought it should.  It looked yellow and weak.  How on earth would such pitiful little plants ever make anything?  They need fertilizer, I thought.  I had bought a bag of  Urea (40-0-0) the year before, so with rain again in the forecast, I took an empty soup can, scooped up some of the granules and walked through the corn, sprinkling them around the plants. 

In a few days, I expected to see the corn plants start to "green up."  But some of them actually looked worse!  I know now that 40-0-0 is some pretty potent stuff, and shouldn't be applied so close to the plants.  I'm probably pretty lucky that I didn't just kill all of the plants with the mega-dose of nitrogen that I put down around them!

But in spite of the rain (and in spite of me), when the sunny days of mid-June arrived, the corn was growing and actually looked pretty good.  The stalks at the south end were still small, and I didn't think they'd ever make anything, but it looked like the rest of it was might make a few ears.

I knew  my younger sister had been having trouble with our neighbors' bull calves (two different neighbors, three calves).  Neither has a real fence for for their calves, and the calves kept breaking out of their pens and wandering through the community (and through her beautiful garden a few times!). 

 Fast-forward to June 22.  

One of the calves visited my corn patch that afternoon too...the tops of about a dozen plants were gone, and several were leaned over. 

All in all though, the damage was minimal though, and I was thankful they hadn't taken out all six rows!

June gave way to July, and the corn grew taller and first started to tassel, then started putting on ears.  Even the little plants that had been stunted by the bad soil, too much rain and a wayward calf had little ears.  The rain had completely stopped - we were officially in an Arkansas summer. Time to break out the watering pipe (a 10' stick of PVC with holes drilled in it) and give the corn a good soaking so the ears would fill out.

As the silks turned brown, we started checking the ears every day.  We didn't want the corn to get too mature (like it did last year).  We finally found four ears that we considered "ready" so we enjoyed our first fresh garden corn that night. There's nothing quite like the first fresh garden corn, IMHO!

BUT, the next morning when I took my little dog Mo around the yard, an ear of corn that we didn't pick was hanging down the stalk of a plant in the west row. 

The raccoons had found our corn patch. 

Now I suppose raccoons like their corn a certain way too, because the ear that was pulled down had only been nibbled on then discarded, and none of the other ears were touched.  But based on our experience from last year, I knew they'd be back.  And when they hit a small corn patch, they can ruin it in one night.  

What to do?

That evening, I asked The Google, "how to keep raccoons out of your corn."  There were lots of suggestions, ranging from the very expensive to the very cheap; from very humane, to very cruel.

One person suggested putting duct tape around the ears, so I thought I'd try that on a few of them.  RAF said I used way too much tape but I wanted to be sure they couldn't rip into the ear.   

I only had enough duct tape to wrap about three ears, and decided that this method wasn't really practical for a corn patch of any size.  Plus, it created a lot of waste that wasn't biodegradable and would just end up in the landfill.

What else might work?  

I had some chicken wire that had been used for my little chicken pen (taken down when the neighbor's dogs broke into the pen and killed my chickens 😭😭😭)  So I got the tin snips and cut some pieces about 1' wide and 24" long and tried wrapping that around a few of the ears.  I tried to be sure the cut ends stuck out on the side of the corn away from the stalk, because the cut wire really was quite prickly - I had the bloody spots on my hands and arms to prove it!

The next morning when I took Mo around the yard, I could tell the raccoon had been back. 

The ears wrapped in duct tape didn't appear to have been touched. 

But I could see where he had tried to rip into several of the ears wrapped in chicken wire. 

He was able to pull the  husks down, but interestingly, the kernels themselves didn't appear to have been touched.  Not sure why that is, but I decided the chicken wire would be worth using again, only maybe space it out a bit more from the ears.

Several of the ears that weren't wrapped with anything had the husks stripped off on one side, and the kernels were nibbled all the way down the ear.

But lucky for us, the raccoon must have gotten frustrated or frightened off, or maybe thought the ears he was able to get to weren't quite ready, so he left without doing too much damage.

But I wasn't going to give him another shot at my corn!

That evening, we harvested almost all of the corn, leaving only the ears that were still too small to eat.  It turned out that RAF was right about the duct tape, by the way, because I couldn't rip into the ear either and ended up having to get the scissors and cut the tape!

It was a decent harvest, and for the most part, the ears were beautiful and just right for eating!

I froze almost all of it on the cob, wrapping each ear individually in aluminum foil.  Although frozen is not as good as fresh, these will make some good eating this coming winter!