An important part of starting our garlic farm is having proper irrigation. And when it does not rain I will need to pump water from the ground to meet our needs. Garlic needs an inch of water a week, sometimes we get that from the rains. But I have been watching my weather station closely and I find some months do not get enough rain to depending on it solely.
A solution to this issue is to drill a well, and pump the water out to use it to water crops. For the last six months I have been working on getting one drilled. It all started with acquiring the proper permits and well survey. Someone comes out and takes some measurements, such as how far the tell is from a property line. Or how close it is to power lines, and once a good place is chosen a survey is written out. I bring that survey back to the county office and I am given a permit to drill.
The wait time was six months to get it done, but I think it will be well worth the wait.
I found a company and they dropped off their drilling truck, and came back the next day to drill. It may be hard to imagine how big this truck is, so I parked my UTV next to it for a comparison.
This thing is a serious rig, pretty amazing they have such machines for mobile well drilling.
Pipes are carried on the side of the truck, they drive those into the ground as they drill.. extensions to get them down to the needed depth. They say their truck can drill down to 500 feet if needed.
I got out there the morning of the drilling and did some weed whacking, months of over growth were all around. Figured I could save us all the trouble of getting chiggers and ticks.
At the same time I uncovered the trench we made into the pump house. Once the well is drilled a pump is added, and a power line and water line will go into the pump house where we store around 100 gallons of water at any time in a pressure tank.
In that trench is a three inch sleeve, plugged with a trash bag so it does not get compacted with dirt before we run the water and power.
With the trench cleaned out and the weeds whacked, I wait for the crew to arrive to start drilling.
They get onsite shortly and start working. The goal was to get 9 gallons per minute, and to drill to 200 feet. The first few hours they worked hard breaking through solid rock at around 70 feet down, but once they reached the 200 foot mark they hit water. And it ended up being a very good well, with a flow of 30 gallons per minute. Much higher than what we hoped for, gives us lots of extra if we decide to expand.
With that much water, we could possibly irrigate 10 acres of garlic. So its great to know we have a good well and its ready for whenever we want to expand. Next is to work on the pump system and then finally the irrigation for the one acre field we are starting on. We are thinking of some kind of drip system, or possibly a reel system.. not sure yet but good we got the water now.
