Water

My weekday job at Peet's Coffee and Tea is generally pretty routine compared to the varied and unpredictable nature of farming. For today, tomorrow, and possibly Wednesday however, we can't serve coffee, tea, espresso, or just about anything else that normally sustains our business, so my coworkers and I have had little or nothing to do. The reason for this unusual situation, for those of you who live outside of the Metro Boston area, is that there is currently a water restriction imposed on Lexington, and a number of other communities in the MWDC water district, due to a recent failure in one of the aqueducts that brings water from Western Massachusetts to Boston. Drinking water has to be boiled before it is considered safe, and at the scale that Peets uses water it's simply no feasible to make beverages. So business has ground to a halt.

What does this have to do with Farming? Quite a lot actually, because having a source of clean water is important to growing food as well as making coffee. And as it happens, we are still trying to figure out how we are going to irrigate our fields this season. Our original plan was to use a catchment system and rain barrels, but installing the gutters and hoses need to make this happen may be beyond our meager budget. That leaves us either carting water by hand, or coming up with an entirely new solution. We'll see.

A lot of people in modern society take having a supply of clean water as a given thing. As recent events have shown, this is a mistake, and the current situation in Massachusetts serves to highlight how much depends on the largely invisible but vital services our utilities provide us with. One of our goals with Cloverly Farm is to be as self sufficient as possible, but it's rarely straightforward; our path to self sufficiency is going to be a long and winding one. Still, water seems like a logical place to start, since it is essential for everything we do.