Irrigation

My parents have a few shares of water for all of there land and I talked them into/we decided to pursue irrigating the fields this year.  Only one problem, one of the neighbors built his house over the top of the ditches.  My Dad had talked to the neighbor which just happens to be the Chief of Police about the situation and  they we still needed to be able to get water to our fields.  After the conversation my Dad found the slope of the property and the only way it would work to get water to the culvert. 

A few nights later he took Rick over to show him where to put the ditch in order for the water to flow when neighbor comes out of his house roaring that we couldn't put a ditch back in.  Ohhhh bad idea.  With tempers flaring they fought it out.  I wish I would have been there to see this but it's probably a good thing I wasn't there or I would have been right in the middle.

After a few days, of what I'm assuming the neighbor researched his rights and our rights, we got the A-OK to go ahead and put a ditch in his yard.  Rick cleaned all the ditches out from the canal down to the fields and tested the water out to make sure it flowed correctly. 

We scheduled to have the water turned on a Thursday, I went up to my parents to make sure that everything worked like it was supposed to... I waited... and waited... and then Myrna from the water office called and informed me she forgot to put the order in.  We rescheduled for the next day and I met Jerry the ditch master at my parents house to go over the process.  We went up to the head gate and Jerry turned the water on at 1/2 foot for 6 hours.  Jerry is a sweet old man, he had a hard time getting down to the head gate.  He drove like a mad man on the dirt canal road. 

The water wasn't flowing correctly so I decided to get the tractor and see if I could fix the ditches.  I got the water to spread out a little more but I made a huge mess of the ditches.  Driving the tractor was so much fun I lost track of time and before you know it everyone was waiting for me to go out of town on a road trip to Colorado.

I left and went out of town.  When I got home I decided to go check on ditches and see how much I messed them up.  To my surprise the water was still running.  6 hours, 3 days... same difference, right?  I tried to turn the head gate off but it didn't work.  I called Rick and he came over and worked on the ditches while the water was running.  I'm jealous of his tractor skills.  He made it look so easy moving dirt and fixing the ditches.  We went up to the head gate and well silly me, I turned the head gate the wrong way.  No wonder it didn't turn off. 

A few days later Jerry called me to see how long we let the water run for.  I told him I waited for him to come turn it off because that's how I thought it worked.  So future reference we are in charge of turning the water off.  Good to know.