My wife Christina is an amazing gardener, and our yard is ablaze with color just now. Our neighbors' dog ate our rain gauge, so I don't know how much rainfall we got this year. We usually get 40 inches, and we seemed to get a lot more than usual this year. The garden hit peak about the last week of May - usually it's a couple of weeks earlier, but we had a fair amount of chilly weather this spring.
I think we had our last good rainstorm during the last week of May. We might get another, but probably not until November. So, now we depend on irrigation. I suppose we could use well water, but we're afraid of pumping the well dry. So, we pay almost a hundred bucks a month for a "miner's inch" of ditch water from the Boardman Canal. The canal dates back to Gold Rush days, and it's an open ditch for much of its length with a nice hiking trail alongside. We pump water from the ditch up a steep hill, so our water costs a fair amount in electricity, too - and it involves a lot of maintenance work.
This year, we had to muck out the concrete tank where our pump is located, and that was quite a project - eight inches of sticky mud at the bottom of a 4' by 8' tank, and that's a heck of a lot of muck. I was covered with mud by the time I got done. And then the pump made a horrible noise and didn't work. Turns out that we had to prime the pump, because our cleanup job had drained all the water from the pump.
I'm not sure all this is worth it, but our garden IS beautiful. Christina has lots more irrigation work planned for me....

-Joe-