mike's blog

Most recently the pump was working nonstop for about a month.  This incarnation of the pump has the waste valve with parts salvaged from the original PVC pump and the check valve with an elastic as a substitue for a spring.

 I've not entered anything in my blog for months now, so a quick catchup:  

Ram pump

The Ram pump has seen several more variations & bought parts.  The latest incarnation is a hodge podge of some of those parts + a carbeurator spring and some wire.  It has been working perfectly for over a  month, with only 2 hitches.  The first was a decrease in the volume of water  being pumped.  This was solved by reinflating the inner tube which had gone flat.

The new ram pump had been working for 3 weeks.  During this time we tried running the pump to a tank situated above the garden, so that we would be able to water the garden through a gravity-fed hose.  The pump delivered the water fine, though the friction of running water through a long length of garden hose prevents a decent flow.  The solution would be to run fatter pipe to a hose point and then hose only as far as needed.

patrick must have been smiling down on dulra today.  the pump has decided to co-operate and is now running (or was when i left the farm this morning).

two things that helped were:

1. releasing the extra air i had added to the inner tube

2. starting with the delivery valve shut and opening it gradually over about 5 minutes.

In trying to commission the new improved ram pump, I could not get the pump to cycle.  After some discussion with Phillip (who has one himself), I opened up the pressure chamber and increased the inner tube pressure.  To do this I had to shut off all the valves, and when reassembling I forgot to open up the output valve.  Despite this, the pump started cycling!  I was temporarily pleased until I realised I hadn't opened the delivery valve, which brings the water up the hill!

It was a warm sunny day today, and while standing on the deck, one of our beautiful black bees landed on me.  I was very pleased to see her, and immediately went up to check on the hives to see what kind of activity there was.  I had been concerned about how well the bees had over-wintered, especially the second colony, as they hadn't had a chance to build themselves up as much as the first before winter set in.

When we first looked at the land that was to become Carraig Dulra, Gary Crocker showed us a natural spring, located down the hill, and suggested we use a "Ram pump" to bring the water up to us.  This was the first time I had ever heard of this type of pump, which doesn't require an external power source to push water uphill.  When we bought the land, we also got rights to use this spring for our water, and my research began.

I collected our second colony of bees from the man who taught me beekeeping, Willy O'Byrne, earlier this week.  The hive was placed at the other end of the hive stand and at right angles to the existing one to help prevent the bees from the two colonies from going to the wrong home.  Willie, who's based in Moneystown only a few miles away, had kindly moved the bees to a location farther from us to ensure the bees were far enough away from their previous location that there would be no overlap in their flight paths, which could cause some of them to go

Wooden hives, frames, feeders, wax foundation, queen excluders, varroa treatment... bees don't need any of this, or at least wild bees didn't long ago.

These inventions are all for the benefit of the beekeeper and the crop. Just like in conventional agriculture, we've harnessed a natural process and have bent it to our needs. Our concern for the bees stretches as far as trying to ensure their survival to continue to give us a crop.

Work in the northeast corner of the land has intensified over the past couple of weeks, as we prepared an apiary for the arrival of our first bees.  Luci has been an amazing help building a woven willow fence as a windbreak. I managed not to get too upset when she had to pull out what was several hours of my work because I had weaved it wrong!