BOL Prepping: Fruit Tree Care, Hillbilly Style

Spice and I spent the day watering our fruit tree orchard at The Place “hillbilly style”… which is to say using a cheap but effective method from the back of our rusty-but-trusty 20-year-old 4X4 pickup.

Orchard care, hillbilly style

First, let me define “hillbilly style”… the hillbilly way of doing things involves finding a way to get the job done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. There are two key words there… cheap and done…

Hillybilly style work often involves “hillbilly engineering”. Hillbilly engineers use whatever components they happen to have at hand, and figure out a way to get the equipment for the job made quickly and cheaply. This often involves the three most important things to a hillbilly engineer… duct tape, bailing wire and a pair of pliers.

No duct tape, no bailing wire, no pliers? What gives?

I know… I know… it’s un-hillbilly and darn-near un-American to put together a hillbilly rig and not use any of the big three… but in this case, that’s what we did.

Even worse… we used a couple of (gasp!) “new components”! The horror!

Still, when you see the pictures, I think you will agree that despite the lack of bailing wire & duct tape holding it all together, it’s pretty darned ‘billy.

The job… our orchard was thirsty

We’ve currently got a dozen fruit trees growing at The Place… trees that we’ve purchased, planted, fenced and protected for years now. We’ve had a very dry summer, and we knew by watching the rainfall amounts at a weather station near The Place that the trees were getting water stressed. Something had to be done.

The challenge? There’s no running water at The Place. Even though “city water” (the rural water district’s lines) run past our property, we don’t have any water lines coming onto The Place.

Why? Rural water when you are as far out in the sticks as The Place is can be REALLY EXPENSIVE. Think $75 a month just for service. That doesn’t count the thousands of dollars it would take for us to tie into the grid. Until we are there full time, that’s not going to happen.

Wells?  Groundwater in the area is *way* deep; wells are Hideously expensive, and unrlieable to boot. We have a pond, and while we could draw water out of the pond, there’s a significant hill between the pond and the trees… so doing it by hand (which Spice has done before) is a TON of hard, physical labor. (ok, 467.6 lbs of labor…walked up the equivalent of two flights of stairs plus some ‘on the flat’ distance.  Not that I’ve counted…) We had to find a better way.

The plan… use stuff we already owned (as much as possible) to water the trees

Basically, to water trees (assuming you don’t have city water), you need the following.

1. Water
2. A way for that water to get from it’s source to the trees
3. A way to dispense that water

Our solution was as follows:

1. Load & secure 55 gallon water barrels into the truck
2. Fill barrels from our garden hose (at least for this first time)
3. Set up 12-volt pumping/hose system in truck bed
4. Drive around watering trees

The Rig

First thing we started with was our old farm truck. No problem there. Next, we needed something to haul the water in. Enter a couple of food-safe 55-gallon plastic barrels that Spice’s brother gave to us. These barrels were clean, and basically sitting around in storage waiting to be used.

The one thing we had to purchase for the job that we didn’t otherwise have was a water transfer pump. There are several ways we could have gone on this one, including a manual pump (cheaper than what we went with) or just a siphon hose, but we decided to go with an electrical purpose-built water-transfer pump for multiple reasons. First, the purpose-built pump is designed to do the job quickly and efficiently. Second, it was inexpensive. Third, it has other survival/prepping uses other than this project. (Such as getting our current in-house water supply on the garden; it’s time for a refresh and refill.)

The pump we went with was a Drummond 12 volt DC transfer pump from Harbor Freight. I know, I know, it’s Harbor Freight, not really a very reliable place to buy from, I get that…. still, I don’t want to spend a ton of money on something I can a) workaround if I have to and b) won’t use that often. It is what it is.

We ended up using a small 12 volt deep cycle battery to power the pump (nabbed one from our portable solar stockpile) and a brand-new hose. We could have used an old hose, but we had this new one just sitting there… we bought it late last fall for $6 on extreme closeout, it’s a really nice hose and we had it on hand already. An old hose would have worked just fine.

The Job

We have our trees each in its own fence (to protect them from deer), and these trees are spaced out over a three-acre clearing… if you call that jungle a clearing…

Let me explain.

We have killed off the normal “cold season” grasses at The Place, and have replaced them with naitive prarie grasses. To the uninitiated, this looks really strange… there are native tallgrass plants growing up to 8-feet high (that’s why they call it TALL grass after all).

We mow paths between the trees, but these are WALKING paths, not paths big enough to drive a loaded 3/4 ton 4×4 truck through.

So… it was time to make my own road 🙂

Metering: How much water does each tree get?

There’s no flow meter on our hillbilly rig, so we decided to do a “hillbilly flow calculation experiment”.

We could have used math and done some “ciphering” like Jethro did in The Beverly Hillbilly. The pump has a stated flow-rate of 290 gallons per hour, so if you divide that by 60 minutes that means that in theory it could/should deliver 4.833 gallons per minute… if Harbor Freight’s specs are to be trusted.

Note what I just said: If Harbor Freight’s specs are to be trusted. That’s like trusting The Hamburglar not to steal any of those nasty McBurgers that he is apparently fond of… except Harbor Freight’s stats don’t smell like pickles and onions.

ANYWAY…

To do our hillbilly calculation, we took one of our five gallon buckets, and timed how long it took to fill it to the four-gallon mark. Turns out, 50 seconds hit the mark. If you do some more ciphering (this may be a bit beyond Jethro’s abilities) it turns out that Harbor Freight’s specs for how much water the pump moves are actually pretty darned close.

Who knew?

Let’s get the job done!

We filled up two 55-gallon water barrels, and headed out to The Place. Once there, we tapped the bung on barrel #1, dropped the pump intake hose into the barrel, and after calculating the amount of time needed to deliver four gallons of water to each tree, we drove to visit our first client.

Since the non-path areas are filled with tall grass prairie, I couldn’t even see where the trees were. Spice was in the back with the rig, and she directed me which way to go. It took us about 45-minutes in all from start to finish to get them all watered… and although the truck had to do a lot of work, we basically just drove, pointed the hose, hit the power switch and pumped the water.

We made it nearly to the end of our orchard on the first barrel, but ran dry with two trees left to go (we also watered some guerrilla plantings that we had (and harvested some guerrilla zucchini while we were at it). Spice tapped the second barrel and we finished up.

Starting our “barrel farm” at the place

We had decided to leave one barrel mostly full out at the place, as well as leaving the pump, battery (plus a solar charging panel to keep it charged) and hose out there.

If we need to, she can use the pump to fill buckets and water by hand (that’s a lot eaiser than drawing water out of the pond). (Because, Not Uphill)

I plan to pick up a couple of more barrels or, better yet, one or two IBC tanks (those plastic tanks that are enclosed in a metal housing). The goal is to put gutters on the cabin and empty them into the tank farm. Eventually, we plan to install a slow-drip watering system based off the tank farm.

Upgrading the quality of the pump

If this becomes a regular thing, or we use the pump a significant amount, we will upgrade to a higher quality pump. For this weekend, this was more of a “what’s a hillbilly cheap way we can get this done” kind of a deal. A $30 pump (after their silly coupon game… PLUS a free 5×7 tarp! Oh Boy!) that got the job done works for me.

For now.