Getting up to speed to this week, last week was all about irrigation and water. Our experiment is months behind, which means that we need to make everything perfect that we can control. With that being said, during  the beginning of the week our time was mostly spend cleaning the ditch and increasing our pounds per square inch (PSI). In order to do that, we needed to clear off all blockages and build ups that may restrict water from flowing down stream. To say the least, the picture below was only half of what we pulled out of the ditch during two days.

Towards the end of the week, our time was focused on fixing pipe, getting risers ready, and testing our sprinkler system. An important thing to do when setting up pipe at the beginning of a season is checking and replacing all the gaskets, clear out all the dirt and rocks that animals may have put in the pipe during the winter, and checking sprinkler heads. However, but before we could test the line for these important and crucial steps, we had to first put the ball valve and 1/2 inch to 3/4 inch national pipe tread (NTP) together on the riser. We accomplished this by coating pipe dope in the threads and screwing the NPT to the pipe, which then would connect the ball valve. Once all 163 risers were completed, we then connected our 126 three inch, 40 foot pipe on our test plots. Take a glance at the fun!

Once we had accomplished our important steps and we tested our irrigation, which we ran into some problems. First off, we didn’t have enough Wade gaskets to repair broken ones, so we had to order some that would not be here for another two weeks. Second, we had a bunch of broken pipe that needed repairs, and we only have a new number of pipe to replace them, due to not having gaskets for the Wade pipe. Third, we were having problems with the sprinklers covering all of the plots with water. To say the least, we had to get over some huge barriers. However, we were able to have just the right amount of pipe, we decided to shorten the risers to cover more area of the plots, and we found some spare Wade gaskets to get us all on track. The biggest lesson I have learned is to always be prepared for worst case situations and if you know problems that can happen, try to avoid them!