Last Saturday, May 9, 2009, we (Joe D'eramo, Jim Phelan, John Martin and his son Jared, Steve Abrams, Carolena McCauley, Sharon McCullough, my husband John and I) dredged the spring and installed the water pump in preparation for the upcoming growing season.  It was a mild but overcast day and the air smelled of rain, so I packed my raincoat.  We donned appropriate get-all-muddy-and-disgustingly-dirty apparel, and with bug spray fumes swirling about us, we trudged down the short path into the woods where the spring is located carrying digging, cutting, and hauling implements.

Thirty years ago the original gardens used this very same spring.  One of those garden members one day innocently tossed a handful of watercress seeds into the spring.  From that

Freeing the grasscatcher from the watercress.  The spring is to the right of the watercress.

innocent act emerged watercress demons from hell, seemingly consuming everything in their wake.  Our first task of the day was to push, yank, cajole, shovel, and tear out as much of that watercress as we could.  We wheelbarrowed the unearthed watercress to the compost as a vegetarian sacrifice to the fertility gods.

With the watercress satisfactorily tamed, we proceeded to dig mud from the bottom of the spring.  We dumped the mud into buckets and Jared emptied the buckets in the woods.  In this manner the spring grew from a mere puddle of about 2' x 6' x 1' to a respectable spring of approximately 9' x 8' x 3'.

A brief explanation of the garden's watering system:  Water from the spring is filtered through a metal lawnmower grasscatcher into a one-inch poly tubing which transports the water into the garden via a manually operated pump... a boat bilge pump, if you must know -  a Guzzler 400 made by the Bosworth Company in Rhode Island, which Joe bought on ebay for thirty-five dollars.

Our attention then turned to the grasscatcher, which had been pulled out of the spring earlier in our days work.  Rust had eaten away part of the grasscatcher door over the winter, so we repaired it by suturing the free flap to the frame.  We then inserted and centered one-inch poly tubing in the grasscatcher, put the door back on, and gently dropped the grasscatcher-tubing assembly into the newly-dredged spring.

The poly tubing is an extension to the original tubing of last year, to accommodate the moving of the pump location from outside to inside the fence.  We clamped the original tubing and extension together and positioned the splice under the trees separating the spring from the garden.

Now all that was left was to install the pump.  Joe brought the pump into the garden where a birch-redwood platform and the free end of the poly tubing awaited it.  After installing the pump, it only took a small repair of the tubing splice before cool, clear water was flowing freely from the spring, through the entire pumping system, and into the garden.

It was quite an accomplishment for only three hours of work, and it was a testament to the meticulous preparatory work that Joe and the others had done (A butterfly told me that Joe said "We got the bugs out last year").

The fertility gods smiled down upon us and held back the rain that day.