Reflecting on the last twelve months at Imago Forest, we've learnt so much and grown more vegies than we thought would be possible without using irrigation. In particular salad mix and carrots are now possible, whereas previously they were not.
With the warmer weather we've been excited about all the crops that we could plant. However almost exactly in time with the warmer soils came the "Big Dry". All of five weeks of no rain. On a typical farm this would barely even register, we imagine, however at Imago Forest we've been looking anxiously to the skies, but have realised that as we are now growing crops that are much more water dependent, we must choose to start irrigating occasionally, or stop growing these extra crops.
As the carrots and salad mix have been popular, we thus began the investigation into how to irrigate... and it was looking like it would easily run into the thousands of dollars. So with a bit of initiative, Paul and Hannah took advantage of the dam being uphill from the mandala garden (part of the permaculture design) and pieces of hose around the farm and constructed a gravity feed pipe from the dam into barrels in the garden.
From the barrels we now hand water the beds as required. Fingers crossed that it will rain as predicted this week, however we now have an option to get by on.
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