March 2000
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Water, Water, Water, Dam! Please double click on images to enlarge We plan
in the end to have 30 hectares of grapes. Each hectare needs a certain
amount of water during the year. At least half of this is required by the
vines after all rainfall has finished for the year, so it must be stored in
dams. One The dam surveyor came up against major problems almost straight away. Our initial calculations of the amount of earth required for the first dam were way short - and the way you pay for a dam is by the cubic metre of earth moved. Instead of a wall a couple of metres high we were looking at something designed to defend the Roman Empire. A wall the same in cross section as a two storey house! To make matters worse the second dam just couldn't be built
where we wanted it. The wall of a As a result we decided not to build the second dam at all, but just increase the capacity of one of the existing dams. All these problems had expensive solutions requiring some impressive civil engineering. Our budget was to pay around 2 Rand per cubic metre of water stored, over and above what we already had, in the end it was looking like a multiple of that. The farm was beginning to look like one of those opal mining areas in outback Australia with spoil heaps from all the test holes scattered all over the place. "Big moles you have here" one visitor remarked. One consequence of all these holes everywhere was the demise of Clive
the female ostrich. The previous owner used to have a pair of ostriches
which he tried to make money from by breeding baby ostriches. They were
kept in the paddock that he cropped for silage and the male, who was very That left the female who the owner tried to sell us. We refused to pay for it as it was just a nuisance and we couldn't do anything with it anyway. We couldn't even catch it! We christened it Clive for no good reason and it carried on living in the paddock which was now being turned into a vineyard. It was becoming a real pest - attacking the tractors and frightening the staff so we were glad when it fell down one of the test holes and got stuck. It was finally trapped in one place long enough for Manie to dispatch it. We don't know how he did it, he is built like a rugby forward but we doubt he wrung its neck. Copyright © 2000 Tulbagh Solutions. All rights reserved. |
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territorial, one day decided to attack the silage mower. The ostrich came
off worse and had to be shot. Quite how you shoot an angry ostrich is
another question - through the head?