A story contribution to 2011: The Year of Idaho Food
The Earthly Delights Farm Crew posing in front of their newly-dug capillary ditch. Photo by Andrea Bruce-Niederer
Yesterday, we dug ditches on our newest piece of farmland. That quintessential symbol of manual labor thought fit for some classes of people and not others, is hard, physically-demanding work. We shoveled in the rain, taking brief shelter under cover while a whopper of a thunderstorm slung hail down from the sky.
April is a frantic month in our farm’s neighborhood, a race to prepare for the day the water comes. The three streets our three farm plots sit on have over 100 water users between them, sectioned off into tidy, three-quarter acre parcels, so allotment of water shares is a complex, competitive process involving avid peer ditch-cleaning oversight, a cacophony of inter-neighbor communication, and assigned three-hour watering times that can come at 2:00pm or 2:00am, depending on the year.
The first year I farmed, our watering time was 4:30am on Saturday morning, which was quite the baptism-by-fire for a gal who believed ridiculously stiff drinks and dancing at the Neurolux were essential components of a decent Friday night. I had to get up at 4:00am and ride my bike twenty-five minutes from my crawl-home-from-the-bar downtown pad out to the farm, just to pull up the little silver gate that brought the garden the hearty swig it needed to bloom and grow in the desert.
It taught me a lot.
In addition to the obvious conclusion that there may be more important ways to spend my time than blowing wads of cash to come home smelling like cigarettes, I realized that real community forms by necessity, and there is nothing more necessary than water in the desert, except maybe using water in a desert to grow food instead of grass. Because my water runs along the neighbors’ yards first, we all at the very least must meet each other, and we also must navigate the more touchy boundaries between private property and shared utility. Many an argument occurs in our neighborhood because John-somebody changed his ditch or his yard somehow, and that affected Jim and Jane down the line. We have to learn to communicate, to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. To deal directly with each other, rather than calling the cops to tattle or complain. Attending a ditch meeting is like stepping back in time to the days when Boise was populated by pioneers still getting seriously riled up over water.
It’s quite a poetic story, really, but one not many people contemplate. I know I didn’t. While a majority of Boiseans snooze peacefully through their automatic sprinkler system running its nightly cycle, scattered across our valley are dozens of people who dutifully set alarms and trudge out to move water from one ditch to another, who truly understand what it takes to have green grass or fresh vegetables in a valley that receives eleven inches of rain a year. What ditch-digging needs is a champion, a sexy storyteller, because ditches are truly one of the most vital parts of our collective narrative. Whether we’re aware of it or not, an elegant web of canals, laterals, and ditches fans out over much of the Boise Valley, not unlike a body’s circulatory system. The main Boise River pours the life blood through the center of town, smaller veins of canal move the water miles away from the river to thirsty neighborhood laterals and the myriad of tender and often frustrating capillaries attempt to move it ever further into the hearts of individual small lawns and gardens.
And the big heart that pumps the whole thing is gravity, assisted now by dams that keep the water constantly flowing without flooding through the whole of our scorching, dry summers. The water can move without any electricity, simply flowing ever-downhill, as water reliably does. Our ditch, the Boise City canal, runs right underneath the center of downtown Boise, through the north end — even underneath several homes — and into laterals in the Collister neighborhood, where our farm sits. We think of Boise as a flat floor with two benches and a curtain of foothills hemming us in on the north. Actually, even the pancake-flat bottom has subtle slopes, and the valley’s first farmers familiarized themselves with them intimately, an education only digging ditches can offer.
In 1886, the forefathers and mothers of the Boise City Canal began digging roughly fourteen miles of canals and laterals along the highest ridges in what appears to be a flat valley, using shovels and an occasional team of horses, to carry the precious water to the back of what is now our new piece of ground. After digging two capillary-sized ditches from the back of our property to the front, I think our farm crew would agree that what our valley’s ancestors’ accomplishment was no small feat.
There’s nothing like furrow-irrigating a plot of land to teach you the very real truth that water always seeks its own level. Every little dip and rise in your trenches affects how the water moves. The first time we ever tried to irrigate, we dug this ambitious, deep ditch, meant to catch more water and hold it for longer than our allotted time. We had a bottle of champagne, and we toasted each other triumphantly as we pulled the little metal gate from the lateral sending the first drink of water to our new baby of a farm. Then we watched in horror as our entire three hours allotment sank into the sandy bottom of our enormous ditch, never to reach an inch of our garden. We didn’t know back then if we were cut out to be “real” farmers, but we proved it so when we finished the rest of the champagne, filled the ditch back in, and started over.
Seven years and five furrow-irrigated plots of land later, I’d like to believe I’ve learned a few useful things about irrigating: deeper isn’t necessarily better; water will never go uphill, no matter what you want it to do; and perhaps most importantly, each watering day is different. You weed and change the lay of your land. The head changes each week, the water carries sediment into the furrows and blocks them, a neighbor’s dog scratches himself a bed in your furrow or you dig potatoes, or . . .
All the headache aside, flood irrigation has taught me a lot about neighborliness, early bedtimes, and desert survival. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Except maybe an automatic sprinkler system.
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Casey O’Leary runs Earthly Delights Farm, a human-powered farm in northwest Boise offering a vegetable CSA and seeds to the Treasure valley. Her seeds are available at the North End Organic Nursery, Edwards Greenhouse, and the Boise Co-op.
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Bravo! I come from a long line of midwestern farmers and am slowly but surely following in their footsteps on my 1/3 acre armed with my body and a shovel. My concern with organic farming, which is what I am doing, (I have access to flood irrigation) is that you ruin your produce with whatever is going on with all of the neighbors water carrying who knows what by the time it gets to you. How do you justify all of the sprays and pesticides in the water on your produce?
Debi,
A valid and important concern. My standard answer is that we live in a toxic world, with polluted air, water, soil, culture, bodies, et cetera, and that it shouldn’t stop us from trying to create sane, beautiful spaces in the middle of all of it. Plus, is highly-treated city water really any better? Ditch water sure is cheaper! That said, I believe you can request to know when the ditch company itself is applying fungicides and other “icides” to the canal so you can avoid watering during those times. I know certified organic farmers can–I’m not sure about regular folks using organic methods in their backyard gardens.