As promised, this week I shall write about Wally and his orchard irrigation.

Wally described the land he chose to buy, and I quote from his column dated December 22  1977, ” ….I had acquired 11 acres of  what was classified as raw marginal land……”, which meant wild rose bushes and poison ivy. The date of the purchase was sometime in 1934.

Wally had the good sense of purchasing land where the entire east side of the property had a creek ( now named Park Rill ) as its boundary. By this time “The Ditch ” had been built so that anyone wanting to use the water could.

For Wally, his land was too far away from The Ditch. In 1934, Wally did not have the financial means to run pipe from The Ditch hookup to his land, so he had to rely on Park Rill to provide irrigation for anything he planned  to grow.

Wally built a water wheel which ran fine until the beavers objected to him interfering with their activities and plugged it up with mud and sticks. That was a battle ground until electricity came along and Wally installed a pump.

The actual watering of the trees involved making shallow, narrow, ditches in the ground along the tree rows. A flume carried the water from the water wheel to the ditches and as the water flowed it soaked into the ground at each tree. The last tree in the row would get flooded while the others all got some. Sometimes the ditches plugged up so they had to be monitored. This was an inefficient way to equally water all the trees.

At some point Wally hooked up to buried pipes which brought Ditch water to his property. I remember the metal flume running along the ridge, which was the highest part of the land. The end of the flume was blocked off forcing the water to back up to be released out of the flow holes. The flow holes spilled the water into the ditches.

I know Wally was not happy with the job the ditches did because as soon as he could he installed pump houses and sprinkler pipes. We had one pump house utilizing The Ditch water and two pump houses utilizing the water from Park Rill.

Using sprinkler pipes meant he could run five lines at the same time on twelve hour cycles and get the whole planting of nine acres watered once a week.

During the late sixties or early seventies, he sold all but three acres. It was on those remaining acres that he decided to install a solid set irrigation system.

That was the best he could do as far as efficiency goes, turn on a valve, turn off a valve. There was a huge reduction in labor and waste was virtually eliminated.

Incidentally, when I worked in the USA during the 1990’s, some tree fruit growers in north eastern Oregon were still using ditches to water their trees. I was appalled at the time and remember thinking that Wally had abandoned that inefficient method by the early 1950’s.

My conclusion therefore is that some growers are progressive and some are not.