Irrigation. 
By Francis L. Wills. 
'ikfr. President } Ladies and Gentlemen: 
In reply to your letter asking me 
for a paper on irrigation, would say 
that we installed our irrigating plant 
on this grove in April, 1905. The plant 
consists of a twenty-horse-power, 
White-Blakeslee gasoline engine and a 
No. 4 Rumsey Improved Rotary 
Pump, located in a house thirty feet 
from the pond and about two hundred 
feet from the grove. The pump has a 
five-inch suction and a four-inch dis¬ 
charge giving two hundred fifty gal¬ 
lons of water per minute; we have a 
four-inch main pipe, running the en¬ 
tire length of the grove, every 150 
feet; laterals branch off from the main, 
running the entire width of the grove; 
the laterals start out with two-inch 
pipe, running down to one-inch pipe, at 
the extreme end. 
Our stanchions consist of a three- 
quarter-inch pipe, with a hose valve 
on top, and are 150 feet apart through¬ 
out the entire grove. When irrigating 
we use ioo-foot sections of three-quar¬ 
ter-inch hose, connecting one end to 
the stanchions and the other end to a 
six-foot piece of three-quarter-inch 
iron piping, drawn together and sharp¬ 
ened at one end to stick into the 
ground with a tee and nipple for hose 
connection eighteen inches from the 
bottom, the top fitted with a three- 
quarter-inch brass Magowan Spray, 
the stanchions when running throw a 
spray that will cover thirty feet and 
we move the stanchions from one mid¬ 
dle to another, until every middle has 
been thoroughly wet down. 
We usually run twenty stanchions at 
a time and leave them standing in each 
middle forty minutes, thus giving each 
middle or tree 480 gallons of water, 
which I think is equal to a little over 
three-quarters of an inch of rain. 
We have made it a practice to irri¬ 
gate the grove whenever the moisture 
sinks three inches below the surface, 
summer or winter, during the months 
of March, April and May we run an 
Acme Harrow over the grove as soon 
as it is irrigated. During a drouth we 
find it necessary to irrigate once every 
two or three weeks, harrowing the 
grove once every week; this keeps a 
good moisture under the sand mulch 
at all times. 
We have under irrigation thirty 
acres of grove. 
The plant, as I have described it, 
cost us a little over $6,000 and as yet, 
the plant being new, we have not had 
to lay out anything for repairs. I run 
the engine myself and have one man 
at $1.50 a day to move the stanchions 
from place to place. 
The engine consumes practically 
twenty-five gallons of gasoline, run¬ 
ning from nine to ten hours a day, and 
