West Bank and pipeline

Post Open Day drought as far as blogging is concerned, things are back to normal with not many interesting items to report on. The weeding, potting, planting etc. has been a bit neglected so it is catch up time as far as that is concerned. Riana has taken the greenhouse under her wing which is a big help and gives us more time to do work in the Reserve itself. We have planted some more trees on the picnic site and have turned our attention to finishing the entrance circle.

Me, after planting a few Widdringtonias. We now put logs around the trees to protect them from marauding mowers. In the background a ringbarked bluegum which is showing signs of stress but refusing to die yet.

At the entrance circle we first put a plastic barrier between the rocks and the soil, hopefully that will keep some of the grass out and, slowly but surely, will be landscaping and planting.

Keith cut down a few suffering coral trees to open up the view. The bare soil will soon be covered with some interesting plants. We have started planting some left-overs from the sale and continued to do so after the pipe work on Saturday. Soon it will look like here on the East Bank.

Then, this past Saturday we cancelled the usual monthly meeting and instead tackled the issue of the leaking pipe I have been reporting on. Thankfully, this time it was no problem to gain access to the property. While Rob an I took care of the ill-fitting join on the lower slope the rest of the crew (Cathy, Ellie, Merika, Keith, Mark, Neil) found and dug up the join between the poly pipe and the cement pipe. There was a fair bit of earthmoving involved, many hands made light work. The rolling out of the coils of pipe is an interesting exercise to keep it from corkscrewing or kinking.

Judging by the big lump of concrete we didn’t mess around when we installed it initially.

After that we fed the new pipe through the old and crumbling cement pipe and managed to connect the whole lot up to the new stopcock on the other side of the railway line. Our whole pipeline is now good, new pipe so hopefully our water supply will be a bit more reliable.

It had been a cold and windy day so afterwards we treated ourselves to coffee and delicious chocolate cake in the Fovs room, a bit rushed for some who had places to go to but Ellie and I still had time to go to the arboretum to check on the water there and were very pleased to find that the water pressure was back to normal.