trough

THE EARTH MOVES PART 3 – ROCKING ON

October 2, 2014Farm life, Gardeningboulder, bushrock, cement, irrigation, lichen, lichenometry, retaining wall, rock wall, stone wall, trough, wateronebendintheriver View all 2 comments

It’s amazing how projects grow. I wanted water for my vegie garden. I wanted a gravity feed water tank that would allow intermittent use of drippers and taps that tend to freak out our heavy-duty sprinkler pump.

The result, so far, is 550 metres of pipes and two rock walls.

Somehow I thought, when I waved my arm at a patch of sloping grass, that flattening it wouldn’t be a big deal. And the retaining wall that would be needed would be maybe waist high. Apparently I have no eye for a slope. James O’Keefe, the master bobcat driver was pretty clear from the start that we would need to move a lot of dirt.

He was also going into hospital for his second shoulder reconstruction. So we had a time limit. Continue reading →

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TANK-TIPPING

August 12, 2014Farm lifeAustralia, Bushman, plastic, plastic welding, poly, repair, Team Poly, trough, water reticulation, water tank, welcome swallowonebendintheriver View all 4 comments

In some places people find entertainment in running up to a sleeping cow and tipping her over. Round here, instead, we like to tip our tanks over. Especially the empty ones that are leaking and need mending.

We use tanks for house water, garden water and stock water, filling them from the creek, or the river, or, in the case of drinking water, from the sky. With a hot summer coming it’s important that they be reliable. Water is, literally, life.

In particular, we have a system of troughs that relies on a windmill pumping from the creek up to a tank on a ridge, and from there pipes take the water to several stock troughs in the valley.

I want to add a couple more troughs to the system to provide water for the new paddocks we’ve created with the tree-planting, so the system needs to be very reliable. The old galvanized steel tank was replaced in 2007 with a new poly tank on the old concrete base.

While poly tanks are the cheapest type to get, it turns out they are not necessarily long-lasting. Andrew our neighbour had been telling me that “the poly tank on the hill is leaking” for several months, but I thought he was talking about his own leaking poly tank. But no, there were two leaking tanks, one of them ours. Continue reading →

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