Mother Nature, the weather.

This is the first drought since taking over the farm full time and finding it a big challenge. Even though am anticipating it, we still have difficulties as at now.

 

We started off our preparation by shoring up the main pond, thinking of keeping a higher reserve of water. Then we clean up the water kangkongs (see older posting Start Of The Dry Season). We then proceed to fire up the water pump, which had been redundant for the past few months. Did a general servicing like changing the engine oil, spark plug, clean the air filter & etc. Upon running, we find the pressure built up is a bit low and plenty of air bubbles.  The fault was traced to the leaky in-take hose. Cost is high for these type of hose as it is non-collapsible. Had it replaced with a new hose. We felt so confident after preparing all these and waited for the dry season to come.

 

Unfortunately our timing was a bit out as we were unable to fill our main pond fully before the drought came. This time, it came covering a much bigger area.

Our water sources consist of pipe in gravity water that we share with our neighbors’, there is a small creek that runs across our little farm. From this creek, we had dug 2 water retention ponds. Another well at our neighbor’s land. We managed to get last year. What we did was that we use the pipe in water to fill our retention ponds. The pipe in water is from a small river a couple of kilometers away.

With more than 23 days of no rain in between, our creek had dried up. The well had dried up. The river, water is getting less and it cannot create a pressure to reach us as we are at the end of the pipe and could be at a high level.

 

The pump was shifted lower and closer to the pond as the suction power is insufficient. Due to the water shortage, we quickly put up a shade for our Avocado seedlings.

 

The shade is a D70, meaning that it is suppose to block off 70% of the sun light. With the strong sun light I think it may not be sufficient. Maybe should had gone for D90.

Had been checking on the weather forecast daily, expecting rain in the coming week. Let’s hope it arrive in time. Stay tune to see if we manage to get by this drought.

Agriculture Sun Shade Netting