THE ART OF IRRIGATION. 



ERRORS TO AVOID METHODS OF MEXICO AND ITALY. 

 CHAPTER II. BY T. S. VAN DYKE. 



FROM what your attention was called to it in the 

 last chapter, it is easy to see that for the best re- 

 sults the whole ground should be uniformly wet, 

 neither so dry on one side of a plant as to throw on 

 the other the labor of furnishing all the water neces- 

 sary for perspiring, nor so wet on the other as to pre- 

 vent full circulation of air through the soil. It is 

 equally plain that if any given part of the territory 

 through which the roots range is too wet at one irriga- 

 tion and too dry at another, they will be kept working 

 unevenly and cannot do full duty. And any devia- 

 tion from sound principle in these respects will tell as 

 surely as fate in either the quality of the fruit or the 

 percentage of the first grade, and generally in both. 



Though I have used trees so far by way of illustra- 

 tion, the principles apply as well to everything else. 

 There will, of course, be cases where you will have to 

 do imperfect work, because the nature of the crop 

 will not justify too much career labor. But it is quite 

 necessary to keep bad work from being too bad, and 

 the surest way to do so is to study the principles that 

 make perfect work. 



The natural desire of the irrigator is to imitate rain. 

 Nothing so uniformly wets the whole ground as fine 

 rain, and nothing irrigates so well as a watering-pot 

 within its limits. If you only had one big enough, 

 with water enough in it, and someone to hold it, you 

 would be fixed. But all attempts to irrigate on any 

 considerable scale by sprinkling will be a failure un- 

 less the arrangements are very expensive, and even 

 then they may be inferior in the long run to some- 

 thing much simpler. The difficulty of maintaining 

 anything like a uniform pressure on the great number 

 of openings necessary for extensive sprinkling lays 

 this system at once out of the list of practical ones, 

 except for a few things and on a small scale. 



Finding sprinkling out of the question, the next 

 idea of many is to cover the ground evenly with a 

 thin sheet of water. Very fine if it would only work. 

 But no ground is found in condition for doing that, 

 and it seems quite as hard to put it in condition as to 

 find it so. If made perfectly level then the water 

 refuses to run or spread very far over it unless it is 

 rammed down flat and smooth. This is just what you 

 don't want, for then it won't soak water well and will 

 bake twice as hard in half the time when the water is 

 taken off. If the ground is made soft and fine, so that 

 the water may readily enter it, and the slightest slope 

 given it so that the water may spread over it, then it 

 displays a remarkable perversity in making little 



channels, which it follows, leaving the rest about dry. 

 And if the slope be the least bit too great, then these 

 channels cut and wash so rapidly as to make the irri- 

 gator incline to wish he had never been born. 



Finding too great the labor of imitating a fine 

 soft rain, either by sprinkling or by a thin blanket of 

 water over the whole, the beginner naturally drifts 

 into letting the water have its own way and planting 

 things along its course where the nature of the crop 

 will permit, or else of making dams around the stuff 

 to be irrigated so that the water will stand in a series 

 of ponds or basins until it soaks in. Into one or both 

 of these methods all early irrigation in all countries 

 naturally drifts. And in few of them is any great ad- 

 vance made for a long time. Both of these methods 

 may be seen in use to-day in many parts of Mexico, 

 and all the early irrigation in California was of this 

 nature. In Mexico the peons have in many places 

 developed the system of small dams or checks into a 

 pretty effective plan. I have seen very good wheat 

 raised that way and very fair work done.but the greater 

 part of the work I have seen there on other crops, 

 and especially in the orchards and gardens, is of the 

 most primitive type of letting the water take care of 

 itself and planting stuff to suit its vagaries. The old- 

 time garden, of which many examples could be seen 

 in California a few years ago, and many of 

 which may be found in all parts of Mexico to-day 

 was a bit of land over which the water crawled in 

 channels of a thousand curves and stood in puddles 

 of a thousand sizes. Everything was planted to suit 

 its whims, here a row of beans on a line that would 

 make a well-bred eel sick with envy, there a row of 

 corn that would puzzle the Reverend Nicholas to tell 

 where it begun or ended, and here, there and every- 

 where, mixed up higgledy-piggledy in the same grand 

 muss, trees of all sorts with vines and bushes innu- 

 merable. From year to year and age to age the 

 course of the water is not interfered with. The same 

 old dry bump that was there a century ago is there 

 yet. Nothing ever grew on it, and it would take but a 

 few minutes to level it off so that it could be wet, but 

 there it still is and will be in the centuries to come. 

 So will the elbow that in a few minutes could be cut 

 through so as to give the water a more effective 

 course. The great great grandfathers have stepped 

 across it and the great great grandchildren will die 

 without cutting across it. And yet the results of this 

 work are far greater than one would suppose. But it 

 is in spite of carelessness and not because of it. The 



Copyrighted, 1894. 



