Oh Drip Tape

I’ve been doing a lot of mowing and removing a lot of irrigation. This is the early winter work involved in putting the field to bed for the season.  It’s typically this time of year that I realize there is something I dislike more than weeding and that is pulling out drip tape that has been covered and smothered with weeds.

Drip irrigation is a very efficient way to water your crops, efficient in the sense of water usage not in the sense of labor. Every spring you must lay it all out and at the end of the season you have to remove it all. This amounts to thousands and thousands of feet of drip tape. Year after year I close out my season with the same activity of wrestling with the drip tape to get it out of the field. It is like resistance training with all the pulling and the following day my shoulders and arms are sore from this intense work out. After the irrigation is out of the way I mow down the weeds.

With the recent rains the weeds are growing so fast I need to mow myself a path to just walk out to the field. I find myself making many excuses to mow, just to delay the annoying work of drip tape removal.