Water, before we needed it

Irrigation went in across July and August.

Two pumps: a three-inch diesel unit and a second three-inch petrol pump, so a breakdown is an inconvenience rather than a lost crop. Suction and flat hose, cam-lock couplings, and a fifty-metre sprinkler line. In August a backhoe dredged three ponds to hold water on site.

The timing was the point. We put this in during the rains — while the ground was workable, the machinery was available and nothing depended on it — rather than in the dry season, when we would have been installing it under pressure and paying whatever was asked.

Ginger does not forgive a dry spell at the wrong moment in its cycle. The rhizome swells late, and a crop that runs short of water in those weeks gives you a smaller harvest no amount of work afterwards recovers.

This is the unglamorous half of farming, and it is the half that decides what comes out of the ground.