You cannot draw from an empty well

First, let me say none of the pictures of land, except the crooked ditch. are from my land.

I am finally making progress on my Olive oil orchard! I received a grant from the CDFA towards a windbreak within their healthy soils program. And isn’t it nice that an olive tree is considered an effective drought tolerant wind break 🙂 

Due to the grant I was not able to begin work on my property until September. Isn’t it nice that I’ve taken so long to take on this project 🙂 🙂

In my regular career I spend most of my day googling how to solve different IT and technology problems. I’m basically a professional Googler. 

But when it came to this property and starting an orchard, I had no idea and Google’s results were not very good/directive. I talked to anyone and everyone I could to try to find someone who knew something and could help me. It turned out there is a guy who lives a couple miles from me who installs orchards with a crew as a living. For anyone wondering the proper term is “Orchard installer”

Paying an expert?

This guy who does this for a living did not have a website, or reviews or really much but a handful of contacts. He said 

“Call this guy for your soil/water test. Call this guy for your irrigation. Call this place to order your trees. Then call us back and we can install your trees. We don’t normally do 5 acres, but we could since you’re close.”

I initially tried to do exactly as this “neighbor” told me. It was a challenge getting anyone to talk to me. I was planning on paying them for their services, but they would often not get back to me in a timely manner. I started this back in April of this year. Only now do I have things ready to go.

The irrigation people came out to my land and said ‘wow it’s flat, I could have done this from my computer and google earth”… yep! He was kind enough to draw up a design and hand me a rough estimate of materials/work. The price tag to bring water to 3 of my 5 acres was going to be $12,000. That’s $3000 more than my grant. And 3 times what i was going to pay for trees. I told him I’d think about it.

After a week, I called him up and left a message saying I’d happily do the work if they would consult me. And I’d pay for consulting. They did not return my call (something that started to become a norm). 

Steal and Nod

Empowered with his list of materials and estimate I decided to try to figure it out myself. Luckily, at the time I was employed by an E-bike company. I had lots of time to think on these bike rides.

Here’s a second picture of local irrigation

I took this picture on a bike ride home from town as i was passing a recently planted orchard. I had no idea what I was looking at, but I figured I would probably need the same thing. They are growing cherries I believe, but close enough.

I had no idea what I was looking at and tried googling for a long time, but to no avail. Even though I’m a professional Googler

Free advice

I had some divine help via a chat agent at dripworks.com. There they let me upload a picture and we were able to figure most of the information out. With that and a lot of time to mull things over I was able to figure out the materials I needed to purchase.

I now have 500 foot of open trench ready for pipe. I’m not sure how to do all of the things to place the pipe, fittings, valves, filters, pressure regulators, drip tape all together. But as I’ve been doing it I think I’m doing it well enough. Hopefully if there are problems, they can be fixed at a later date.

Learn from my mistakes

Here is a drawing of my irrigation plan. I’ll keep people updated on how successful it is.

not drawn to scale

  • 1 ¼” pipe from my well down the middle of my land, about 2’ underground. 
  • 2 stub ups from there for future use.
  • At the middle of the land it sizes up to 1 ½” pipe 
  • Go through a filter
  • Go through valves that have pressure regulators on them
  • It will upsize to 2” pipe to go East-West across my land
  • Every 18’ hits a T and sizes down to 1”
  • Goes into 1” poly pipe up from the ground
  • 1” poly pipe hits 3 Ts to 
  • 1” poly connects ⅝” drip tape with .33 gph emitters ever 2’
  • 2 lines go North-South in every tree row.

Tree Design

Also I had a clever idea for how to tell how many trees to purchase. I used excel and calculated out the feet for my land. I had some teenagers draw up about how big my land was at points.

I used Excel to help me figure out how many trees I would need.

A 2nd clever idea was that i could grow my trees spaced closer together early on.If planted closer, the trees will produce fruit sooner and if I want to thin them out. I can pull them out and sell as a mature olive tree. Still working out the details of how to easily remove them in 3 years… 

Wish me luck!

Thanks for reading my journey through this long labor-intensive process of getting irrigation to 5 acres of land. After all is said and done, It’ll cost me a little more than ¼ what I was quoted.