Garden Water

To garden successfully in rural Canterbury, you need water, lots of it. Moosey's Country Garden is lucky - we have a main county water race running right through the garden and an irrigation right to draw water from the race.

The Water Race

Depending on the season, we water the garden at night after midnight and may put on 50 to 75 cubic metres of water in one night.

The water races were built in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when it was difficult if not impossible to drill wells to a depth of 30 to 40 metres to get access to water for stock and people - the Canterbury Plains can be a very dry place in the summer.

There are however large snow fed rivers running through the plains from the mountains to the sea and in the late 1800's a network of open cut water races fed from the nearest river were constructed throughout the plains - they are still there and we have a major one running through our garden. It carries up to 0.5 cumec/500 liters per second/100 gallons per second which is actually equivalent to quite a large stream.

The Pond

An 80 mm/3 inch pipe is laid through the bank of the water race and gravity feeds the pond at a rate of up to 2.8 litres per second. A simple plastic gate valve with a lever and floats regulates the flow of water into the pond so it doesn't overflow.

The Water Pumps

From the pond, water is drawn by two pumps, a little one which is used for hand watering and the big pump which is used to run the fixed irrigation system.

The Sprinklers

The irrigation system consists of around 40 sprinklers. They are a mixture of pop up sprinklers in lawns and impact sprinklers on riser pipes and which covers most of the garden.

The big pump is also used to supply moveable irrigation equipment to water other parts of the property to keep crops growing in dry seasons and grass green for the sheep.

There is also a good supply of groundwater which we use for domestic purposes (cooking, washing etc.) but we don't have a well of our own and share one with neigbours and the amount of water we can take is restricted.

Footnote - The New Well

In the winter of 2004 we finally had our own well put in. I am still waiting for Stephen to write a nerdy informative article about it! All I have is a photograph.