Talk about not only falling off the fucking horse, but then rolling into a ditch and somebody dumping a bunch of garbage bags on top. Hey. 👋🏽 It’s me, Swati, coming at you from under a pile of trash. Trash of my own making, comprised of laziness, lack of focus, cellular distractions. The week-long vacation to the seashore? That wasn’t trash. That was awesome. But it messed me up guys, because I’m still kind of here, floating.

We haven’t completely moved on from soil science, but we are on a little detour through irrigation because how well soil holds water is not just biological and chemical, it’s also physical. We need to understand the difference between irrigation tape and emitter hose. Directional irrigation tape is this engineering marvel. It connects to a hose spigot via various pipes and fittings that allow it to lay flat on the ground. It’s directional in that the water has to flow from one side of the tape to the other, and that depends on the tape you bought. The reason for this is because inside, there are various channels and filtration structures (I’m sure there is a more precise way to describe this) that remove sediment and impurities from the water and send it along to a little hole that emits droplets of water targeted toward the root systems of your row crops. That way you’re not just hosing a field and getting water everywhere. It’s efficient, clean, and an investment Goddamnit. Here’s an example. This tape isn’t cheap, but it’s better than emitter hose, that two-wall cheapy garden hose looking thing with holes punched in the middle willy nilly. Irrigation tape buys you dinner first.

I was very distracted last night by the names of all of these products — AQUA TRAXX AZUL, end caps, and my personal favorite, goof plugs.

WHAT IS A GOOF PLUG? IS IT AN END CAP!!! — Tess

If I’m leaning into gender stereotypes is this newsletter, it’s because a bunch of irrigation motherfuckers opened the door with male and female fittings. I know that’s nothing new in the pipe business, but JFC it’s everywhere. I still don’t know what a goof plug is, but I’ll put money on it being the purple thing. It has to be. How does one set up a Kalshi bet?

I’m actually very interested in irrigation because of my dad. (Awkward transition, I know.) Many an adventure did we go on to find the right sprinkler heads for our garden. One time the city was giving away bags of free sprinkler heads. You know, the kind that conserve water. Rainbird I think. Anyway, you had to fill out a form with your email and get a voucher for 100 heads down at Ewing Outdoor Supply. Well Dad had me fill out the form with about a hundred email address and we showed up every couple of days to claim our loot, thinking they’d forgotten about us, a brown father and daughter. You know those crazy people who wait in line outside the Louis Vuitton store to buy expensive purses? Amateurs. Anyway, it didn’t take long for the good people at Ewing to be like, “Hey — you can’t have 7,000 sprinkler heads.” We took the news well, knowing we were at the end of our rope 5,000 sprinkler heads ago. Still got a stockpile o’ heads btw.

In terms of technical detail, I’m actually more interested in these irrigation apparatuses than learning about all of the microbes partying in my compost. Don’t get me wrong, I care about that too. I’m just less likely to crack a book open about it than I am to just follow the basic steps of compiling, watering, and turning organic matter. I trust my senses and intuition with that sort of thing. I roast coffee in a similar way too. Not on one of those newfangled machines hooked up to a computer that shows you a sine curve of your roast. Talk about taking the joy out of something. I like to just sit there, listen, watch the temp, and pay attention to smells on my very manual (and very loud) drum roaster. Same plan on how to handle compost.

What I like about irrigation is the design element. How you have to figure in the quality of soil, slope of your property, weather, flow rate, and crop type into the kit you build. There’s measuring involved, which I typically hate. Just move any picture in my house to look at all the guessing bullet holes. But in this case I think it would be really gratifying to set up high quality irrigation tape along the entire length of a row of non-explosive diarrhea lettuce heads and watch those happy green babies shoot up. The water in irrigation tape flows evenly even when you have a thousand feet of it laid out, did you know that? And it defies gravity. You can be sloped uphill and that water is still going to move. Isn’t that cool!?

Anyway, I’m off to bed. Thanks to my reader-friend Michael S. for the pep talk yesterday that helped me get creatively unstuck. Do you have friends who give you permission to be yourself? If you don’t, get some.

I’m going to close with some artwork by my class bestie Tess.

Her trying to backpedal two mins later.

If this was high school, we would have gotten separated.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about Soil is a Feminist. I was really touched by notes I received, especially from men who found it insightful. You’re all terrific allies. There will be more of that once we exit the phallic, penetration-assumptive, squirtalicious world of irrigation.

Good night! 😴