Month: December 2018

Background

It’s been an interesting start to summer at the farm with plenty of rain coming down at the start of December followed by a dry spell with little meaningful rain falling over the past few weeks. The last few days have almost topped 40 degrees Celsius and with the orchard trees already struggling to come back from the previous grasshopper situation, we have been ensuring that the recovering trees have plenty of water to drink.

In previous months, when the temperatures weren’t as intense or when we had more regular rainfall, we had been managing the watering with a simple 25 litre water container and a bucket and spending time filling it with water from our main dam. With the 17-ish orchard trees that we are currently trying to grow on the property, we found that we could do two runs filling the containers and then transporting the water in the back of the car up to the trees in need, which was an OK task to complete but was quite time consuming and required much more driving than I was happy with.

As such, I decided to put together a simple water trailer that I could use to haul water in bulk up to the orchard where we could simply plug in some hoses and water in a more traditional manner. I also figured that having some sort of portable water system could be beneficial in the case of fire, so I am sure that once the orchard is more permanently accounted for the system will have some reuse.

The Build

My goal was to build this system on a budget which means that several components are used. My build consisted of:

• A used trailer that I was able to pick up on Gumtree at a cost of $100. The trailer does have a few faults and was unregistered at the time of purchase, which is fine as I don’t expect to be driving it on the road at any time and had already wanted something to move some firewood around in the cooler months.
• An IBC water tank that I also picked up on Gumtree at a cost of $100. This seemed to be the cheapest price for a clean IBC within the Canberra region, with this tank previously holding fish.
• A 1″ High Flow Petrol Water Pump which can be used to both fill the tank from the dam, as well as pump out water from the tank as a firefighting tool. I picked up a cheap Warton pump from edisons.com.au and, to date, this has actually been performing surprisingly well. I’ve bought some other items from the site that I am not that happy with, but I can’t fault this pump yet. Cost was $205.  
• A 1000L IBC water tank Kingtainer adapter. Getting the right connection for the tank to the hose was actually a bigger saga than I had originally thought it would be as I had assumed that all IBC tank fittings were the same. The Kingtainer adapter which fits this tank was actually the third fitting that I ordered in.. but thankfully it does a good job for what we need. Total cost was around $45 by the time I dropped the container down to a regular hose fitting.
• 10m x 1.5″ 38mm ID Suction Hose For Transfer High Pressure Fire Water Pump. Another slightly smaller saga in that I had assumed that 1” hose should fit a 1” pump, which it didn’t. The second hose was $80.
• Ratchet tie down straps x 2. Bought a couple from the local hardware shop for $6.
• Jockey wheel. The trailer didn’t have one and I decided that once the tank is full of water it would be a pretty big pain to attempt balancing with cinder blocks or the like. Ended up costing about $35 by the time hardware was included to attach it to the trailer.
• A couple of Garden Hoses. I think I paid about$20 total for the 45m of hose that I have.

Grand Total: $585

Outcome

Having used the trailer now for a couple of weeks, I can definitely say that it is a time and labour saver and a great addition to our kit. Where we were previously carting up water 30L at a time, we can now “comfortably” take up around 600L in one go, with the trailer seeming to handle this OK without getting overloaded.

However, I did have an interesting moment a couple of days ago when I decided to refill the trailer a little too close to the dam, as shown in the below picture… Fun times!

That’s all for this update. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

James

If you’ve viewed our Instagram posts, you would be familiar with the grasshopper plague that has decimated our orchards for the past few weeks. The grasshoppers themselves have devoured a large amount of the orchard leaves over the past few weeks, with the warm to hot weather and spring rainfall all playing a part in making the leaves of the trees more appetising than you’d normally expect. Our upper paddock around the orchard had turned brown quite quickly during periods of warm weather, with a week or two hovering around 30 degrees Celsius, which lead to a large amount of the ground cover grasses dying off. The soil up the top of the hill seems to have been sparse for quite a long time. We know that there is a mob of around 100 kangaroos that frequents our property and with the location of the hill both bordering natural bush land, and the property itself being a good distance from the main traffic ways, the kangaroos have had their way with it without any disturbance. Enter the grasshoppers who seem to have spawned in large numbers this year, likely due to good spring rainfall, and with little else to eat our orchard must have looked delicious!

After spending quite a bit of time deliberating about what to do with these grasshoppers, thinking about either blocking their access to plants or utilising some sort of insecticide, I decided to spray all the trees with eco-neem. What I like about the eco-neem product is that it’s registered organic and only controls a range of chewing and sucking insects. As new apiarists ourselves, with one hive already on the property, we wanted something that would target the pest grasshoppers whilst maintaining a safe environment for our bee friends, as well as be safe for pets, birds, lizards and other beneficial insects. The eco-neem is actually an extract from the Neem tree, Azadirachta indica, and works by suppressing the insects appetite and restricting their growth. After spraying all trees 1 week ago, I am somewhat happy to report that the orchard trees don’t look worse than they did a week ago, but sadly I’m not sure that all will make it.

But, every cloud has a silver lining, so whilst a few trees may struggle to get back on track, some lessons learnt:

1. Anticipate grasshopper action from early to mid November. 
2. At the first sign of grasshopper damage, spray all trees with eco-neem.
3. Anticipate that grasshoppers will also love eating vegetable garden crops. Utilise row-cover on all beds that may be effected.
4. Plant hedge rows, or encourage long grasses to grow, around the orchard and vegetable gardens. From my research this week I’ve read that there is some thought that providing the grasshoppers with an alternate meal can deter a number of them from attacking plants that you would like to protect. 
5. Once we are living on the property, run our chickens or other grasshopper eating birds through the orchard during the months of grasshopper activity. Free food for the chickens and free eggs for us! Yum!

So, a matter of “live and learn” I guess. Hopefully these actions will allow us to not only control the problem in the years to come, but perhaps we can benefit from it also!

Best wishes,

James