water – Gallifrey Forest Farm

we have a little list..

2016/08/14 Danielle 0

Last weekend, the auto-waterers for the chicken coops went in. K spent most of Sunday digging and cutting sections of hose, attaching taps and connectors and the float-valve controlled water dishes to each of our coops. We have two up-cycled 200 L plastic olive barrels as the water reservoirs, which should only need refilling every couple’ve weeks even in summer. It’s a pretty big item to tick off the to-do list, because making sure the poultry have access to fresh water all day every day through summer is a real pain when using the standard pet-shop waterers (max size: 10 […]

Rain and fog

2016/07/18 Danielle 0

I recently learned (due to a whim of curiosity during the morning commute, and the availability of Google at all times of day, except for one stretch along said commute which has no mobile phone signal) the difference between mist and fog. Fog, apparently, is ground-level cloud, while mist is something that rises from the ground (or bodies of water). Now, every time I see one or the other I have to hesitate for a moment while my brain refreshes and I remember which is which. Currently, this is every morning – it’s been a misty winter so far. […]

A failure of marketing

2012/10/05 Danielle 0

In a dry(ish) climate like ours, water is life. Where there is water, plants grow and animals (and people) thrive. This is fairly obvious to anyone who’s experienced our baking hot summers. Gallifrey isn’t on mains water, so even if we wanted to use the output of the dams and the desalination plants, we can’t. The water in the deep aquifer is fully allocated for agriculture in the area, so we aren’t allowed to sink a deep bore or well. We are allowed to sink a shallow bore, and according to our neighbours the water isn’t saline, but drinking water […]

Permie Porn!

2012/06/18 kai 0

It’s finally the rainy season here in Perth! We’ve been waiting for this for a while now and the first serious rains started up about a month ago. I meant to post this earlier but life has conspired to keep me busy. We were eagerly waiting the first big rains as it would be the first big test of the swales we spent so much time working on over the last few months. Our first visit up after the major storm was actually for our house warming night up on the land with the bonfire (We made up for the […]

Trees and Water

2012/05/15 Danielle 2

No scheme water, and no bore or rainwater tanks in place, made irrigation over the summer a very labour intensive task. So every weekend we filled up a couple’ve barrels with water and drove them up to Gallifrey, then manually transferred the water to the water tubes around each of the trees using watering cans. We tried a few water containers, and experiment showed that the recycled plastic olive barrels fitted with taps were the best. The flexible plastic water bladders that we tried first didn’t hold much water, and sprung leaks after two or three uses. The plastic slimline […]