By Zoë Bradbury

May 14, 2008

You’re probably all wondering what happened to me. Two plus weeks of silence since my last cliff-hanger dispatch about the cash flow crisis. Did she go belly-up? Bankrupt? Are they auctioning off her pickup, her $100 Earthway seeder, and the steel ribs from her greenhouse (now valued at a whopping $380 per ton for scrap metal!)?

Not yet.

I’m hanging in there, but facing some major shortages. Money, yes, but there’s something that’s become even more critical right now: water.

Mother Nature must hate me. Two weeks ago it was “gripe, gripe” about all this rain, the cold, the never-ending winter. I couldn’t get out into the field to plant. I was over a month behind in getting my perennial rootstock into the ground and dealing with marginal soil conditions for doing any kind of tractor work.

Now I’m doing frantic little rain dances in hopes that the forecast, which predicts only a 20% chance of showers in the next few days, will deliver up some H20. I’ve got plants in the ground and no way to water them. After five days of sun and wind and warm afternoons, the soil moisture is dwindling and I’m racing the clock to finish an irrigation system that has been delayed all month.

As the rain poured down during the month of April, I was busy lining things up for my irrigation system (consisting of about a half-mile of buried PVC mainline feeding 18 underground valve boxes, powered by an electric pump that pulls water out of the river). I hit one setback after another. Our local irrigation supplier got pneumonia and had to check out for a while, the parts I needed had to be special-ordered, and then the whopper: the discovery that I had to have an entire new electric service dropped to power my pump, at a price tag of about $6,000. Ouch.

Finally, the pieces started to come together two weeks ago: The power company came and installed the new service, and the electrician came and wired it all up. I took out a many-thousand-dollar indirect loan via my mom’s credit line. A huge bundle of pipe and a pile of fittings were delivered to the field. I rented a riding Ditch Witch and spent a day sawing a two-foot-deep trench down the edge of my field. Meanwhile, it drizzled and spat — my beets germinated, and my strawberries put on a new set of leaves.