Monday, April 30, 2007

Earthworks delayed

As per the warning of old Bill the farmer, the earthworker we had booked has been delaying his arrival after saying he was quite sure he could be here with a machine on Tuesday. So we called another earthworker named Alan from Gipplsand Excavations and he kindly came out on short notice to take a look yesterday. He was a really nice guy very straight up about when he could have a machine here, and for the same price as the other guy ($110 per hour) could get us a 12-ton excavator with a tilt bucket that will let us dig the swales from the side. So we've switched over to him and moved the earthworks to begin Monday May 7th. Meanwhile Warren the farmer from up the road (Bill's son) has put 150 calves on the block to chew down the grass giving us a better view of the profile of the land for the earthworks. It's amazing the effect 150 calves can have in a few days...

On the fruit front, the existing large apple tree east of the house is bearing heavily - very late in the season. And the experimental cucumber type things we planted below the tennis court are bearing prolifically with no watering our attenion through the end of the dryest summer in a 100 years or whatever it is...

Just walked around the property. The calves ate one of the three surviving casuarinas near the spring. The pipe feeding into the dam was for the first time visible with a flow of 370 ml (the size of the tea cup I was holding!) every 10 seconds (3,200 litres per day or 11 million litres per year) and the central valley flow through culvert was 370 ml every second (32,000 litres per day or 1 million litres per year). Not bad for the end of summer!

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