Gardening in a Kilt (Buzz Kidder Canvas)

[Bugbear]

I finnished the second round of watering on the citrus. I might write up something on how the watering grid and so on works out there and patch it into this post later.

Ok, here's a description of the irrigation system I have set up for my citrus trees. All but one of them are in a row across the back of my property. The property slopes very slightly to one side. When I moved here the citrus were flush with the ground with no connecting trenches or paths for the water. This meant that each tree had to be watered individually with a slow trickle from a hose. It's a little difficult to get gray water to do that, and it is also nice to be able to water everything all at once. Over the course of a year I dug in a network of connected potholes and trenches. I tried to make this look a little like a dry river bed.

On a tree and particularly a citrus tree, it is best to have the tree trunk and root ball a little above grade or at the middle of a mound that slopes away from the trunk. I didn't plant them and they were quite established, so I had to remove some of the top layer of the soil to make the flood basin. That's what all the pot holes and trenches were about. The ground did begin to slightly slope away from the trees out away from their row, so I piled a berm up at that point with the soil I was removing.

This was enough to make the flood basin, and the slight slope from one side of the yard to the other promoted a gentle flow of water from one end of the basin to the other. I had to be very careful about removing the soil from around the trees because citrus tend to have many surface roots. Digging shovel sized holes allowed me to work on an area then leave it for a month to let the tree adapt while I worked on a different tree's area.

One tree is off to the side of the row, I didn't plant them , and so I just dug a irrigation trench over to it and gave it it's own basin. I put a spill over point at the end of the trench that meets the main watering basin, so that when the main basin is filled to a point, it spills over and flows to the off row tree. When that trees basin is filled, the watering is done. Mostly all I have to do to water them is use a garden hose with a heavy weight on the end to keep it from flying everywhere down in the main basin. That would be with a fully opened valve of course. It has worked quite well, and I can also direct gray water into the basin in the same way.