As you probably know by now, we raise our animals on primarily produce grown in our own gardens (instead of buying commercial feeds). It's a lot of work, but the cost / benefit factor is amazing. This concept is the basis of how to make small farms profitable!
But, this year, 2017, we almost lost half the garden, the ever important zucchini and pumpkin, to a bug.
Gardens are full of insects, some good and some bad. Bugs are constant battle gardeners of all sizes fight. But this bug was unlike any other! This bug, one single bug, had the potential of wiping out half our plants in a slow steady death. To make matters worse, this bug is invisible and elusive! Once it rears its head up, it is difficult to track down without very specialized tools.
Not the typical cucumber beetle, not squash bugs, those are mostly controllable with Guinea Fowl and simple soap. No.. this bug is very very different. Immune to all normal methods of containment and riddance. This bug, is a real challenge!
Over the last 2 months we have been fighting this bug on an almost daily basis. The plants were suffering, and stunted from it's effects. The harvest was dramatically less than expected, and some plants even just died. We feared that unless we can get a handle on this, we would loose the remainder of the harvest and end up having to purchase animal feed from off farm! That would be devastating in our present financial position. So last week, I decided it was time to get to the bottom of this situation once and for all.
You see, this bug is not the typical insect, not even an insect at all! This... is a computer bug. Those elusive defects built into anything computerized by a programmer's oversight or failing, that allows things to go astray in some way. What does this have to do with a garden? Water... the blood of the earth. without water in the proper amounts, nothing lives. Our entire watering system is "computerized" meaning, run by a digital timer. Most things digital have inside a computer running a program, and therefore, can have bugs. The difference here is that in a device such as a timer, you cant "debug" the program using normal means. It is hard coded into hardware and is what it is, unchangeable, untraceable.
The timer we prefer is made by Galcon: http://galconc.com/product/6100s/
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| This timer is battery driven, 6 zone, easily programmable, calendar or cyclic, water windows, overload protection, weatherproof, reliable, and has 2 severe bugs in it's programming! |
Such was this bug. Until.. I found it!
Here's what happened. The timer we use (LOVE this timer! best ever, aside from it's now 2 bugs) has two separate modes it can operate in... calendar and cyclic. A calendar mode say "turn on water at 9am on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday for 3 hours". A cyclic mode says "turn on water for 3 hours every 2 days". Very different, with pros and cons to each. We tend to use cyclic for sprouting and growing to ensure frequent short but consistent watering, and switch to calendar for maintenance and harvest. And therein, the switch between the two, is where the bugs is born!
This bug is related to yet another really cool feature of this timer. Water windows! I love water windows! The challenge with sprouting through drip tape on a water timer is the hot southern Oregon summer days. In order to keep the surface soil "moist" to germinate seeds it is necessary to water frequently throughout the sun filled days. But if the water kept going all night, it would flood! So to prevent this, we use cyclic timing with water windows. A water window is quite literally a window of time when and only when the water can turn on. outside the window, watering is restricted. Its a perfect answer!
Well, except for this bug. What happens is... I set the cyclic timing for frequent short watering during the day, and the water windows to disable water at night. But then as the plants reach maturity, I change the program to calendar. Since calendar is a "deterministic" mode where you say definitively when to turn on and off water, the window is not necessary, and the setting of the window removes itself from the programming screen. That's appropriate, right? you don't need windows so it should not be visible in the programming details. BUT, the programmer who wrote this, forgot to disable the FUNCTION of the window along with removing it's CONTROL from the screens. Naturally, we assume if something is not settable, then it is disabled, right? well no, not in this case.
So, when I switched a couple months ago from cyclic to calendar, the water windows dropped off the screen but stayed enforced! any calendar timing I set, would be overridden by the now invisible water window and water would not run! Some zones got full water, some partial, some NONE (or so little it was effectively none). WE tried to manually water, but trying to maintain the right water balance between this unknown semi automatic amount and an added manual amount was impossible, the plants suffered from this "bug".
Once I discovered what was going on (after days of trial and error and deep exploration), the fix was simple. Just switch each zone back to cyclic temporarily, disable the water windows that then showed up on the screen, and switch back to calendar mode. Easy enough! The bug was eradicated within minutes, once I saw it. But, damage is done.
fortunately, the garden has sprung back to life within a week of fixing this. The proper water amount has doubled or tripled the plant size in only days. Well, to be honest, we also applied a good amount of good homemade fertilizer (another post) and sea minerals in an emergency treatment. But ultimately, the water is what did the trick.
So, lesson learned, bugs come in all shapes, sizes, and forms. This particular bug, the computer bug, is perhaps the worst of all. But it was conquered and now avoidable!
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