Catching up

 This is a catch-up post since we haven't updated in a while...

Since our last post a lot has happened. We moved 30 miles West to Waimea  at the end of our GoFarm Incubator program and have been busy installing systems their while keeping production as active as possible. The environment and problems in Waimea are quite different , but I will get to that later.

First, an update on our work at the GoFarm site.

We finished the 850 gallon reservoir and installed a pressure tank and pump to feed our screenhouses.



The pressure tank is a 40 gallon model from the Home Depot with a pressure regular and one way check valve connected by 1-1/2" PVC pipes. We hooked it into the regular irrigation system so we could bypass the reservoir and use the GoFarm system when water was available. It also made it easy to fill the reservoir whenever we ran irrigation. The diversion at the bottom was for a venturi  fertigation system that we used to feed the shadehouse plants. The pump motor was a 1/2 HP shallow well pump.



You can see the reservoir fill pipe from the main GoFarm system and the draw pipe, which goes to the shallow well pump. 

This system worked pretty well, though it turned out 850 gallons was only enough for two or three watering periods. Enough for a temporary system outage but not for an extended downtime. Still, we found it made consistent irrigation mush easier to manage, having that reservoir of easy to access water. It beat driving 1/4 mile to start a gas fired pump and waiting for it to pull water and then pump it all the way back to the plot. 

The reservoir fed our drip lines in six shadehouses
Dripline feeding a pepper plant

a new hoop house. This will be a greenhouse

Here you can see the 1" white PVC line from the pump/reservoir which fed additional screen/green/shade houses and water spigots.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) we did not need this system in Waimea, at least for now, because the water pressure and availability is not a problem. But we did learn a lot about irrigation and thart helped us set up the new site quickly.


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