How Not to Irrigate

At my urging, we are setting up an irrigation system.  Mainly because if I had to water one more 500-foot row of anything with a watering can, I was going to kill someone.  This morning we measured out some pipe and, of course, realized it was too short because Farmer never takes care of anything and this pipe has been sitting out in the driveway for over a year, where it probably magically shrank.  (Actually, Other Farmhand #2 tells me that the pipe was hit/run over with the tractor several times during the winter, so some parts of it got damaged and it had to be cut down.  Of course.)  Anyway, around 8:00 this morning we realized there were pieces we needed, and Farmer said he would go to the store and get them.  At 4:30 in the afternoon he finally left to go buy the parts--and the hours in between were not spent outside, I assure you.  So it's now 10pm and there's still no irrigation system.

Incidentally, last week when we started the irrigation project,  Farmer told me that drip lines (thin plastic tubes that you put down along a row of plants so that water can drip out of the tubes and water them) could be found "near the hayfield," to which he pointed vaguely.  I was supposed to get them and lay them out by the rows in the new fields.  Now, I guess I haven't quite caught on yet because when he said this, I pictured the drip lines all in one place, ready to be used.  I mean, I'm not an idiot, I didn't think they were organized neatly or anything crazy like that--I was picturing more of a tangled mess, but at least a tangled mess in one location.  I did not assume that they were stretched out across 500 feet of ground in the fields where they were used last year--fields whose inhabitants were now weeds that came up to my shoulders.  That's exactly where they were, though, and instead of simply sitting on top of the ground, they were buried underneath clumps of dirt and patches of weeds, so I had to rip them up and lay them on top of the weeds and hope I could find them again, and THEN measure them and cut them and drag them to the new fields.  And that, my friends, is how not not to irrigate.