Will there be water

I’ve now got getting in for four hundred metres of drip irrigation pipe laid in the hope there will be the water to sustain the veg crop this year. They say it is better to bury the pipes but that is a step too far for me.

Laying out the pipes is fiddly and time consuming but once there and linked to my big tanks watering is just a question of opening taps and crucially remembering to close them.

I’ll soon run through the 6000 litres of stored water from the winter and I’ll need to start pumping uphill from the spring fed pond.

It’s all a bit of a faff and easy to see why so much once-worked land in hilly/mountainous Italy was abandoned. Stone terraces are lovely to look at and a testament to ingenuity and the will to survive but hell to work with machinery and keep clear of weeds and beasties.