We didn’t realize how lucky we were to have access to irrigation water. For those of us from the ‘burbs.. irrigation water is COMPLETELY separate from water you get from your well. In our past life, we watered our plants with the same water we drank, and we paid a water bill monthly. But we now live in the world of irrigation canals and water, and it was a whole thing!
Before I start in on our journey to figure out our current irrigation water situation, I should talk about our first introduction to this irrigation water concept. We were just starting to move beyond country-life dreaming, and actually starting to look at land, when we came across what seemed like, a dream property. It was just land, no house, but it was 11 acres of usable land, in a beautiful community, with an irrigation canal running right through the middle! To me, it was like having a small creek running through the property or a little babbling brook, and I was already envisioning building a house right at the end, and enjoying a nice evening with the family outdoors and the sound of water always in the background… *sigh*
Come to find out, an irrigation canal is NOT a river.. and cannot be treated as such. There’s lots of rules around them.. including many easements. Right in the center of the property, the area that was the best area to build a house, were several rectangular boxes coming out of the irrigation canal and we soon learned that each of these boxes belonged to a different neighbor, and each of these neighbors had the right to access this part of the property to clean their boxes. Right up to what would be our front yard. And then the other half of the canal? Well that belonged to someone else, and he was responsible for repairing it, if the canal failed. Add on to that, the department responsible for these irrigation canals would be conducting DAILY (yes, I said daily) inspections of the canal during the irrigation season. So much for a peaceful time out in the country? Plus, we didn’t relish the idea of so many people having access to our property with our kids out playing. But I still couldn’t fathom that other people could just come out and clean their boxes… the realtor acted like this was the most normal thing in the world… welcome to country living I guess?
Ok, fast forward to our current property. Now we are the ones that own a box on someone else’s property. That’s what we were told upon sale of the land at least, we were allotted a certain amount of miner’s inches each year, and here was a non-descript map of where the box was, and “good luck!” Where were the lines that supplied this water to our property? The map showed a box that was a significant distance from our property, so did these lines run under the road? Did they run through someone else’s property? There was a network of sprinklers on our property that were presumably run off this irrigation water, but how did they have enough pressure to operate? Where was the valve? Was there a pump?
Thank God for helpful neighbors. We were finally able to locate our box … way off the beaten path. Turns out we actually shared this box with other neighbors, so our water flowed into another box that split into 4 separate pipes and they all went their own direction. The box was very very old, and made of steel and had been repaired by good hearted neighbors for years. It didn’t have another irrigation season left in it.
So. Add it to the list.
Matt has a project -driven mind.. so, he will think and Google, and sit and Google and TikTok (ahem) some more until he gets a plan together in his head for a project. He’s also a perfectionist, just like my dad… which I think is great for my dad because that was not a trait that I seem to have inherited. I am solidly on team “good enough” for most projects in my life, and I’m sure you have seen/will see through our progress. Anyhow, good thing I married a careful project completer, so that he could do projects like this, ones that we have zero experience in.
So he had the idea to use a square steel wine box as our new irrigation box, and it worked! He added learned a lot about plumbing, pipes, overflows and drainage pipe, between him and my dad, I think it turned out pretty well! And hopefully this thing will last beyond our grandkids, so they don’t have to worry about the source water of our irrigation for awhile.
We still (as of the date of this post), have no idea where it comes into the property.. and where the valve is.. but that’s next on the list.
