Vanilla flowers and soap suds

Our vanilla vines have flowered for the first time.

While the bore driller was here we asked him to recondition our existing bore which has been in use for ten years. We think it has become silted up a bit with clay particles over this time and we hope that cleaning out may give us a better flow rate.


Pulling the bore pump out of the bore hole 30 metres below the surface took a huge effort. Once it was cleaned, we had all sorts of dramas being able to stuff it back into the hole. Poor Digs - he could get it back in OK but not the last metre of the pipe and in trying to force it, the wires broke so the pump didnt work. Three times the bore pump was pulled up from 30 metres below. A huge physical effort. He developed a system using the car and a pulley after the second attempt. The final solution was to cut the last metre of pipe off so it would fit back into the hole. We were using our back up system for 3 days before we finally switched back to the bore pump.

Bore Driller finds water

The bore driller arrived on the farm this week after three years of us waiting and hoping that some day soon a drill rig would make its way across the Daintree River and over the Alexandra Range.

We had to join forces with our neighbours Colin and Dawn to share the cost of freighting the drill rig over the last range on a huge semi loader, as the rig could not negotiate the grades on its own. This was a big gamble because we had to pay this cost whether or not he found any water.

We have not had enough water to irrigate our trees for the October November period. There is such a slow rate of flow coming out of our existing bore that many of our mature Mangosteens defoliated last January under the stress of the dry. We just could not pump enough water out of the bore to save them. We pumped for an hour and then we would have to wait another hour for the bore hole to fill up again and then we could pump for another half hour.

The bore site has been chosen as the old well - the place where Digby and I hand dug a well 12 metres deep in the early nineties. He drilled down through the old well to 20 metres and we found water. The interesting thing to know was that if we had persevered with our hand digging for another 2 meters we would have found permanent water. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing!

We have been told we now have a flow of 4,000 gallons an hour at a depth of 13 - 18 metres below the surface. If this is true it means that our irrigation problems are over.