Hello,

It seems my questions all revolve around water or electricity, and my question today is no different.

I am planting some persimmons around my ranch, which I can only visit once or twice per month. This planting of 10 trees is just the beginning of what will eventually be several hundred different fruit and nut bearing native Texas trees for wildlife habitat. My ranch is located in NW Texas, and because of the unpredictability of rain I would like to put together an affordable plan to distribute water.

One post suggested the use of hydraulic rams for moving water from low to high elevations. I have a lake that will drop a consistent 50 to 100 gpm over it's spillway on a decent year, and I was asking about harnessing that water. The hydraulic Ram is something I plan to implement to collect water. I have learned a LOT on youtube on building and using them. Very good stuff, and it all started here on the forums.

Now I'm looking at collecting a lot of 275 gallon water totes. I can haul water to them if I need to. I have a 3000 gallon trailer to fill those up. I would like to get a month out of the totes I put in place though. I could put a drip to the trees I plant from the tote, but I wanted something I could control a little better than an always-on drip. Maybe a solar pump with a timer? I've been looking, and it seems there are a lot of setups like that available for fountains. I was thinking of something like this http://www.aquabarrel.com/product_water_pumps_electric_dc_solar_15w.php

but to buy that, it's $475.00. Surely I could do better if I build my own system. Also, I'd need a timer that I tell to run, for say, 5 minutes at 8pm and again at 6am. I could gang as many totes as I need to get the time I need from it, but I don't want to go with a drip unless it will give my small trees the small amount of water they'll need every day. I would appreciate any information or resources to make this happen. Building it myself would ensure I could fix any components that fail over time, as well as allow me to make 10 of these setups to scatter around my ranch.

That's a pretty neat setup. I'll be intersted to hear what the others have to say. I'm going to be planting trees along a road from the new house down to the pond in order to hide the house, or at least some of it, from the highway. I was thinking more along the lines of getting my water from the pond directly to the trees. It would only be about 100/150 yards. I'm sure somebody here will have a good idea on a DIY system.

Well, a hydraulic ram is a really neat thing, and it's cheap and easy to build. That will move water uphill from your lake with no external power source needed.

Something a little more mainstream that won't take as much effort to plan and build is a floating submersible. I had one in my front lake before it dried up and it worked great! I just found it buried in the dirt a couple of months ago, I'm going to clean it up and see if it still works. It's been about 15 years since anyone ran it. Just get yourself a submersible pump, make a mini dock with some wood and foam, stick the pump in the middle, and float that on your lake. You can either run power to it, which is how ours was, or I'm sure you can get a solar setup fixed up.

I am sure I will implement the pump in the lake, but the totes will be extremely useful in areas far from a reliable source of water.

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Cisco,

Have you done this yet? did you decide on a way to water your trees? I am thinking about it too..

thanks

dustin