April was all about water, glorious water. We have mains water, but it’s not potable, so we’ll catch rain water off the garage roof. The mains would be fine for irrigating the gardens, but we’ve constructed the dam because we intend to use quite a bit of water for this size food system, and we’ll be charged on a metering system in a couple of years time. Why pay when it falls free from the sky? But most importantly, we like the idea of sustainability and independence, not having to rely on external supply systems.
This was the dam site before we started….
Karim testing the quality of the clay that was coming out of the hole half way through construction, which was clearly nice and sticky…
And thanks to all your superior visualising, we ended up with a dam that will hold about 185,000L. I'm standing in the middle to give you an idea of the size. There weren’t too many large rocks to contend with and the clay was perfect, so it should seal really well.
Once we re-surveyed the waterline the spillway was constructed so any overflow will gently flow into the forest, we covered the entire dam in topsoil ready for planting and dressed it with a few special rocks that came out of the hole. Now all we need is some rain!
Once the dam was finished our excavator operator, Bob, dug over 250m of trenches to house all the irrigation pipes, and we commenced laying out a total of 800m of poly pipe weighing over 100kg.
Bob then buried the pipe (which protects it from fire) under spoon drains that will also direct the water from the culverts into the dam.
We ended up with five different pipes along the garage: 1” pipe to pump drinking water up to the header tank; 1.5” pipe to gravity feed drinking water back down to the garage, 2” pipe pumping dam water up to a header tank and gravity feeding it back to the garden, ¾” pipe for mains water into the garden (in case the dam is low); and 2” pipe for the future house tank to gravity feed its overflow down to the bottom tank. We also took this opportunity to lay the telephone and electricity cables to the garage while the trench was dug, and it’s all since been buried and dressed with blue metal.
Karim followed the plan that tooks us several days to map out, strategically placing taps around the property before the trenches were filled.
He also has the dam site ready to install the pump, with gate valves that will allow us to either pump up to the header tank, gravity feed to the garden or fight a fire.
The final part of the project was to get the water tanks in place, which involved constructing a level 9 x 5m slab on relatively steep ground.
But we got there in the end…
Then came the job that we severley underestimated – filling the box frame with 12 tonne of blue metal. We tipped it over the embankment from the road bit by bit onto some old roof sheeting…
Then had to shovel all 12 tonne of it by hand (thankfully with the help of our next door neighbour) until it was level…
At some point in this process (thankfully toward the end), I lost the will to live…
Once the tank site was ready it was time to cross our fingers as the excavator attempted (successfully) to lift two large tanks over the embankment.
Amongst all this, Bob also managed to create a turning circle around the garage and dress it with blue metal, construct a wonderful frog pond, remove a large wattle that was blocking the sun and sucking water and nutrient from the growing area, and stack all the large felled trees ready for us to chainsaw firewood.
This was likely to be the largest project that we’ll undertake until building the house, and without speaking too soon (the dam needs to fill so we can test the pumps and lines etc), it seems to have gone exceptionally well.
