Acequia - a dry run

When I woke today J was rigging the acequia gate: he wanted to flood the field and water the clover. The main gate was closed, diverting water out of the acequia and into the main channel, which was full. A trickle had begun to run through the system of pipes and secondary channels that fed the field.

When we started, the field looked like this.


In the afternoon, it looked like...this. No change. "This field usually floods in an hour," J said. Where did all the water go?


Some of it went here, the jungle of clover that had overgrown the secondary channels. But when we hacked through this cover crop to get a look at the water's route, we found it was running down into a system of gopher holes. My first thought was that this could be a new innovation in irrigation: subterranean watering, feeding roots without losing water to evaporation. But the tunnels seemed only to occupy a small part of the field, meaning most of the water was lost. We were wasting serious water, no doubt. Whether the associated drowning of gophers is a good thing (they won't bother our plants any more) or a bad thing (they're dead now) depends on your perspective.


Some of the water popped up through this hole, at the edge of the field.


The pink stone, barely visible in the photo above, plugged one of the gopher holes and got the water flowing in the right direction. But by the time we'd made these adjustments, the acequia was getting low. The day's allocation of water was up.