March at Last

I'm glad to see the end of February. As I walked this morning, officially the first of autumn, a fog rolled in, then out again as quickly as it came. The morning had a peaceful feel to it. I saw Chas, the retired carpenter who packs up every winter and goes to Evan's Head on the NSW central coast, on his walk, picking up litter in J.A.C.Russell park near the station. He yelled a greeting to another walker heading up the main road towards the school. The other man, also a 'regular', I think is an R.S.L. man named Borg. He gives me a nod if we pass but I have not yet had a conversation with him. He has grey, wavy, brush back hair and a trimmed beard, a serious look, and usually one long sock pulled up and one down. The lady driver of the postal van gave me big wave. She likes 'Snowy'.
This was my second trip up the street this morning, having taken Robbie up in the car earlier to catch the 6.10am bus. He's started his biotechnology degree at Monash Uni. and had to leave early every day so far this week. He's looking into finding shared accomodation somewhere down near the campus to save all the travel time. After dropping him off I saw Eileen walking up the main road in the dark. She walks earlier than me usually.
The last day of summer was not pleasant. We had 2mm of rain in the gauge in the morning which dampened things, but gave rise to dreadful humidity when the sun came out. I had an order for trailing ivy which took me back to Julian and Marg Dyer's garden where I'd picked camellia the previous day. Julian, a long time potato farmer who works these days with Bruce Ure, always has a good handle on the weather forecast, and had told me there was a good possibility of rain, saying there was talk of big rain in East Gippsland, maybe up to 150mm. It did happen there but we were on the edge of the rain band. Julian was home for lunch and said they'd harvested 40 bins of potatoes in the morning and after lunch he had to go and move three irrigators. "Got to be done", he said.
We talked dams and water and pumps. He said their crop this year was as good as they could expect, given that they'd had a pump break down in early December just when we had those 40C. days and the spuds sat there and copped it when they needed water. They had to pour concrete for a pump base well down a gully, the only way to get it down was on sheets of iron, a hell of a job. They installed a new 100hp. electric pump which puts out 1000 litres of water every 45 seconds (as I remember the conversation) and the spuds grew alright once they got water on them but they're a bit gnarly. Some of their dams are pumped dry now so they need good rain.
I told Julian that we didn't use more than 2 megalitres of our 14 meg. allocation at our little farm last year because our dam wasn't big enough, and we aren't allowed to divert water from November to April. A ban was on from September this year because stream flows were so low. He said we should get a twenty ton excavator into the creek and build a a bigger dam. I explained that we don't own the land on the other side so he suggested we make an arrangement with our neighbour, so I then explained that when old Bob Jones died he left his land to the State Gov't to be kept in tact till the last of his horses died. The Burnley Horticultural College has an annexe there and the last horse died years ago. I heard recently that Burnley was looking to have 8 one acre blocks subdivided off along the creek.
Julian responded saying we're going to see big changes. He said there's blokes in the Sth. Austalian mallee growing crops of 3-4,000 acres of spuds. "We can't compete with that."
"Where do they get water?" It was a silly question.
"Artesian", he said, his eyes fixed on mine stoically.