Yesterday I continued working on dad’s garden on my own as he is in Rose Lodge for respite .
Before he went in we had a conversation about all of the blue plastic water drums that he has there full of water , along with two full plastic ib’s drums .
He told me at first not to shift any of them as he doesn’t want to waste the water that’s in them and have me tip them out .
So I said what if I move them one drum at a time and I pump the water over to them and I wondered and hoped that would he agree ,
he surprisingly said yes . But you don’t have to do it while I’m away was the next statement
I assured him that I was going to .
So then the emptying of the barrels began in earnest , with me getting the pump out of the shed and setting it up only to find that it’s not a self priming pump so it was useless for that job ,
I went back to my place and I grabbed a 12 volt bilge pump and a car battery to power it .
So I set that up with hoses and that was a great idea and worked beautifully for about ten seconds , as the water in the barrels was so full of algie and weed that it instantly blocked the pump and stopped it ,
I cleaned the pump filter screen but then exactly the same thing happened .
So idea three , to bail out each drum with a pair of 20lt buckets and carry the water to refill the drums,
I filled six drums and then pondered the problem of the drums that were left with their lids on , I then pushed each one of those over and the algie polluted water poured out of them onto the ground , lucky I had gumboots on , as it made a big pool of water on the ground
I moved those drums to a spot under the bush out of the way ,
then a friend turned up with a backhoe and he was smoothing out the ground and shifting big buckets of dirt for me , I then went home and got a pair of lifting slings and then I opened both gate valves on the Ib’s containers and their water content spilled onto the ground and I then attached the lifting slings to them and we shifted them out of the way with the backhoe .
Today
I took my trailer and a few tools and a few treated pine posts from home and headed out to the block ,
I had discussed it with mum and we had decided on a few more garden beds to finish off the area , so I layed out the pine poles into position and then I trimmed off the excess with my battery chainsaw , before using long bugle screws to fasten them together , once all three beds were done it was time to add some soil to both fill them up and to bed the poles in .
Mum came for a look and she weeded around dads seedlings that are now popping up everywhere
His plants are going well with his garlic and the seedlings he planted before respite , all growing Mum has been watering them out of the six drums ,
I’ll take a few pics of the plants next time
The crazy part is that dad has water tanks attached to the shed they are chock a block full and it’s plenty to water the garden we are building him now .
I had to curse a few times as his square mouth shovel I was using to shovel the dirt has bit me with splinters in the web of my hand probably three times .
But I managed to get nearly everything done except to get mulch and lay it out everywhere on the paths between the garden beds , that will be next time job ,
The idea of the mulch is two things to suppress the weeds from growing and hopefully to suppress old man Curly from planting stuff everywhere as he did exactly that last time he was there .
So I rigged up the hose and refilled all the open plastic drums up to the top
Maybe when dad sees this he will be happy , but I’m not holding my breath
Any avid gardener would be happy with what has been put together just for him ,
But we will know on Monday or Tuesday
I just hope that he likes it .
Cheers