Lookit My Big Tomatah: A Tutorial

That’s a lot of hose.

The other day we needed a fresh tomato for the first time since being plied with our own all summer. We didn’t need it for anything particularly tomato-infused: we were making burritos, for which the barest excuse for a tomato ought to do. So we bought one from the store, and I mean a fancy one, hydroponic and grown a few miles from here, and when we sat down to it, S said it. He said: this tomato sucks, comparatively.

Planning one’s springtime garden in November is akin to planning to run a marathon while undergoing chemo. Ideas are ambitious and you can’t wait to do everything you can’t do right now, and maybe, if you’re just masochistic enough, you’re already putting dog ears in the seed catalogues’ pages.

Do you not remember? When I told you about how we watered the upper garden with no water source, I was going to tell you all about how we managed to water a quarter-acre garden without a reliable source of running water. And then I mentioned to you that I was going to exert this particular didactitude, and S. took offense to the fact that I’m describing out system as less than reliable. Remember?

Well, I remember. So I’m going to tell you all about it.

The land just down the hill from Cooter Hollow contains a nice plentiful field which got down on its knees and begged us to put some vegetables on it. And, no strangers on the witness end of beggardom, we did what we could.

Running alongside and down the hill from our garden site was a stream, not a big one, but enough for some to consider a Reliable Source of Water. You win, baby.

So, here’s what you need if you want to feed a garden from a stream:

1> A bucket
2> A hose fitting
3> A way to get the hose fitting in the bucket, down toward the bottom (I’m sure as soon as he gets his blues on this posting, he’ll let me know what that thing is. A knife? A little saw? A big muscle?)
4> A shitload of garden hose, including, if you’re intrepid, the black hose with weep holes

(Is “weep hole” not one of the best linguistic creations to enter our language, given how it’s used to describe things like water hoses and outhouse barrels? I am the most obdurate user of “weep hole” in the history of English, I swear.)

It should be obvious what to do with all this, although as usual, it’s his special design which wasn’t obvious at all to me until I was knee deep in it. So: attach the fitting to the bucket and some hose to a fitting, and find a place upstream where your bucket will sit happily submerged. Put some rocks in it if you want; it weighs it down and helps filter out the snakes.

Run as much hose as it takes (we went 400 feet, or maybe 500, I’m told, to really get smacked in the head by the PSI, but you can get away with far less) in the direction most convenient for gravity. If you’re feeling particularly lazy, you can lie the weep holed hose along the rows of things you want to stay good and wet, and then go have a beer, because you’re just installed what amounts to a sprinkler system without pumps or water bills or pipes. Because you are some sort of genius. Or, at least, your guy is.

Then eat as many goddamned tomatoes as you possibly can, and there will be many. Because sooner than you’d like, in these parts, you’ve got a thousand cans of gorgeous salsa but you need a little fresh yip for your burrito.