How did the old-timers water their crops?

Pauman, I have always wondered but I have never before found anybody who might know: what did the farmers do when the rainfall was heavy and the river was raging? Wouldn't it tear the waterwheel apart?[quote=Paumon;7098593]Dad built a waterwheel in the creek and used that to deliver water to wooden sluices and thence to canals and ditches he dug, something similar to the one below. Waterwheels have been used for irrigation for many centuries.

Depending on the size of the waterwheel, some can be designed with a system of levers and pulleys to be levered high up out of the flowing water when there's high flooding and for when the waterwheel is not needed for lifting water to sluices (like in winter for example). Also they can be designed so they are not actually erected directly over top of the main creek but are erected beside the creek over top of a dug channel with a series of sluices and gates (and floodgates) that divert and control how much water goes from the creek to the channel under the waterwheel. I'm sure there are many, many other methods have been invented over the centuries but those two methods are the way my dad and his folks before him designed their waterwheel systems.

If you look at the picture I posted you'll see that the waterwheel there has been erected beside the main channel of the creek, there are water gates behind it and there is a smaller channel that is diverted to run underneath it. The picture shows that the waterwheel was not operating at the time the picture was taken so either the water gate behind it is partially closed or the wheel is presently lifted up out of the water. If it was in use it would be wet and there would be lots of drips and streams of water dripping off the paddles and sides.

There is more information about the different types and designs of waterwheels and their many uses here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_wheel

Further to the idea of using wheels - there is something that many people in several countries still use to deliver ground water and lake water for irrigation to crops. That is the water pump wind mill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpump

Yes they did.
56 years ago when my parents started taking me to the same church I go to now I remember a lady pastor. Years later she wrote a booklet called
Now Will You Believe?

I have one of them and in it she tells of a 1955 Ladies Tuesday Prayer Meeting that a male farmer showed up to with an umbrella. His farm was south several miles from where I grew up and he told her if it did not get rain today his fields of corn would be dead. No rain was in the forecast and it had been a very dry month. He brought the umbrella because he said he was not leaving the church until he needed it. Such faith inspired her and the farmer and the ladies present prayed for rain and it started small then turned into a very good ground soaker.

I remember Rev. Ruth Garlanger as a woman of prayer and a powerful speaker. You can google her name and title and find her with the church she started back downstate after she moved from our church up here.
Ruth Garlanger built a Cavalry Light House Church in St. Joesph, Michigan in the 60s. My family visited there often.

Up here in Michigan I grew up on deep clay with about 8" of black muck on top of it. All of the minerals are in that muck and the food was always a lot better growing and tasting. We never watered the field crops and that black muck turned to rock when it dried out. Any rain though had to be used by plants or evaporate because it couldn't get through that 24 feet of clay. Our vegetable garden was pretty large and it got watered if it got too dry.

On our property pre 1960 there was a windmill pumping water to a tank high up and a system of wooden flumes for watering certain areas.

My grandparents carried water....in buckets. Lots of trips.

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Round here the only thing that grows with out supplemental watering is winter wheat. We have a park that used to be a farm house and in the early 1900s the young farm wife carried buckets of water to her beloved trees. All 56 of them. Twice a day on top of her other chores. Now a hundred years later there are 53 left standing, one blew over in a storm, one to dry rot, and one was removed for a parking lot.

They started building the canals around that time here. Hundreds of miles done by horse and man power. Most of them are slightly on the hill side so the farms are gravity fed and the fields all were at an angle so the water flowed down. It is pretty impressive when you go to the local museum and see their display on how they created the farming around here.

So the answer is hard work. I am sure with enough water and work you could irrigate anywhere.

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My area uses windmill pumps. Also we don't grow much. We have cattle, grow hay and wheat. That's pretty much all our climate can sustain. Oh other than the sporadic crop of sunflowers. I die of ecstacy when the farmer plants those. But yeah, we don't water our crops here really. A few farmers have the water systems but not many.

I have the galvanized watering can my grandmother used to keep her garden growing. I have no problem carrying the can when it's full now that I'm an adult--when I was little, what a struggle when I tried to help her!

Cropped on soils that had sufficient water but not too much.
Dug ditches to create water uphill or along side (dikes) of crops.
Planted crops that could deal with the local conditions.
Planted a diversity so that when they didn't get lucky and a crop failed they still had something.
Had livestock too to get through the hard times and graze the tougher lands.
Hunted.
Gathered.
Starved.

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I remember Mom carrying the dishwater (Had dishpans then) out to water her tomatoes

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Very wasteful wooden pipes and troughs off Hand dug canals.

They are all over the desert around here.

Page 1, got a malware alert! The first time this has happened on HT?!

On the topic, irrigation ditches, as well as hand-carrying... I imagine that is why old homesteads were so often by bodies of water.

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in Wisconsin it is a minority of fields that have any irrigation

but we get rain nearly every week most years

also grandpa would bring grandma a great big load of manure for the garden every valentines day approximately

in the fall all the leaves would be piled on the asparagus patch to keep the weeds down and and moisture in

plants were watered in with a pail of water each when planted and as needed a pail at a time after that

areas that would require watering were left as pastures and grazed

hay and winter wheat were the major crops for feed and grain here , with root vegtables like turnups , carrots and potatoes filling in for home and stock


watch the old farm houses they are almost always in between 2 hills or at the bottom of one most of these had a spring , a spring house and an area that the spring kept green even in a dry year others later had a wind mill and a tank

most houses were fitted with gutters and a cistern

In some old homesteads are here you will see flumes

My Mama (92) said her father hauled water in barrels, then the kids would all line up and do a bucket brigade type deal, with the ones at the front putting a little water on each individual plant. They just didn't have enough water to have ditches full for the gardens.

I had to remove some images from this thread as the images were linked to a site known to contain malware.

In the desert southwest, there are many old irrigation works the Anasazi [or their descendants] put into place.

In the end, they moved away, and the pueblo indians moved nearer to the rio grande.

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My Grandmother was one of 12 kids that were born in the 1920's on a farm.
Birth control wasn't so widely available then, but the farmers needed farm hands anyway - so what better way to get free labor?!?
It would seem that my Great Grandfather was somthing of a wanderer, as I remember my Grandmother saying many times about Mama and her and her siblings having to do much of the farmwork themselves as Papa wasn't around much - supposedly he was some type of carpenter, but I think he had a tad of mental illness.
Grandma would say about hoeing the corn, weeding the garden, picking raspberries, growing and picking stawberries, etc. And you can imagine with 12 mouths to feed - plus Mama and Papa (when he was around), it took all of the family to keep food on the table.
(You have to wonder nowadays how that would go over - forcing your children to work out in the hot sun day after day day.)
And I'm sure when the weather was dry, my Grandmother and her siblings carried buckets of water from the springhouse to the plants to keep them alive and producing.

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Michael W. Smith in North-West Pennsylvania

"Everything happens for a reason."

Way back in the day they used dirt ditches. Then they got real up town and got concrete ditches. Then they went all out and got these huge sprinklers on high wheels and are still using those today. And I figure it won't be long before all those sprinklers are replaced with the really high pipe with drop down hanging sprinklers. I like those because the water is right there where the plants can use it and not spraying across the road covering unsuspecting cars. At my house we use a 2 1/2 inch firehose and some really deep ditches around the garden. I hope to change that to pvc pipe and not have to drag that fire hose around anymore. And if you are having to haul water in buckets, I salute you!