- I purchased ~30 acres of property (raw land) in northern Minnesota earlier this year.
- It has zero apple trees on the property. I would like to change that.
- When I talked to the the apple tree guy, he made it pretty clear that unless I can apply 5 gallons of water to each tree per week for the first year of growth I'd be wasting my money.
- I'm newly married and my wife won't appreciate me burning up half a day (or 25% of a weekend) watering trees for a whole year. And even if she were cool with it, I'm far too lazy to put that much effort in.
Project constraints:
- There is no well on my property. There is, however, a stream that crosses onto my property for a little bit.
- The distance from stream to the location where I want to plant the trees is not exactly known, but is estimated at 200-300'.
- I have a Honda EU2000I (2000 watt peak) generator.
- Apple trees require at least two in order to cross-pollinate. I'd like to have a bit of a buffer in case one of them doesn't pull through.
- There are a lot of deer on the property. Presumably they'd love to eat a young apple tree.
- I'm looking to get by on the cheap.
My current design idea is, roughly:
- Pump water from the stream to some type of containment apparatus.
- Use a microcontroller to operate a valve of some sort to release water from said containment apparatus where it will be fed (ideally by gravity) to the trees.
- Power all of the electronics from a deep cycle battery, possibly enabling self-charging with a solar panel.
- Equip the microcontroller with a host of sensors. Perhaps most obvious is the need for a water flow rate sensor. Other sensor possibilities include rain, soil moisture, temperature, humidity, wind speed&direction, barometric pressure, possibly others.
- Since the area is somewhat remote, but has decent cellular coverage, a cellular network connection seems to be the best fit.
I started floating this idea around work. I started off imagining this with a 250 gallon "tote" and asked around if anybody had a spare one lying around or knew where I could get one. I should not have been surprised to get some very puzzled, but curious, looks from the other software architects on my team. Nobody had anything to offer in terms of 250 gallon totes.
About a week went by. Then, a gentleman who sits next to me brought up one day that he had something that he needed to get rid of. It was a water tank, of unknown capacity, that he needed to get out of his yard. After looking at the pictures, it seemed to be much larger than a 55 gallon drum, but certainly it was no 250 gallon tote either. I decided to take a look at it.
Turns out I struck the jackpot! It's 125 gallons, doesn't leak (that I know of yet), and all it cost me was a trip to his house to pick it up on a Sunday morning. BAM!
Here are some photos. Since it was unseasonably warm when I got it home, I took to power washing it.
