Water, water, water... the gold of Mallorca

It's a recurring issue every year again: water for irrigating the land, the vineyard, the orange garden, the jungle, everything.

A wet Winter and Spring on Mallorca
It's still Spring and we are moving fast to Summer.
Yesterday we had again a rain bonus of 15 mm rain, which converts in 450 cubic meters of water on the entire estate. A real bonus and in our memory we have never had such a wet Winter and Spring.
Last year we had a week with extreme much rain: about 50% of the annual rainfall in 1 week (annually we get an average of about 500 mm).
Although we were very happy with this of course, it's much better to have half this 250 mm rain but spread out over a period of a few months. And this is what is happening the past 6 months, it has rained very regularly. The rainfall has been kind of tropical, short and heavy showers.

Irrigation
The 15 mm rain of yesterday means that we can postpone the irrigation issues and tasks. And there are many tasks related to the irrigation.
Last year I spent about a month on installing high up sprinklers in many of the pine trees as I saw this as a good alternative for fighting the limestone problem - as it's much quicker to remove the limestone from 25 sprinklers than from 1000+ small holes in dripping tube. Just put the sprinklers for an hour in vinegar and it clean again. The problem with sprinkling from above is that many plants and trees don't like it at all. I referred to this before, but especially pecan trees (also known as hickory tree, the wood being used for tool handles, ladders and such). The leaves have tiny little hairs on the upper side, which feels like velvet. Watering the leaves from above deposits a thin layer of limestone on it and it will not thrive anymore, partly blocking the sun and preventing breathing.

Removing calcium on industrial scale?
This could be an option, but you need tons of the special salt, which binds to the calcium molecules. During Summer we are irrigating maybe 15 m3 per day. So for me de-calcifying is not really an elegant solution. Rain water is the solution, it contains zero limestone. My idea is to collect as much rain water as possible, store it in a huge deposit and use this water for irrigation. The idea is not new, and I am already working on creating a lake on the downside of the estate. Most of the top layer of soil has already been removed, so we reached the bedrock. One of these days I will experiment with drilling a few 30 mm holes in this bedrock and fill it with a mix of a special mortar and water which expands with a huge force. I can't wait to check if the makers of this stuff prove to be right that it can break the hardest types of natural stone, including granite.
I will certainly write a post about this. This special high expanding mortar powder is kind of expensive, but like many products you can buy it cheap in China and ordering a pallet (I love ordering by pallet) of this stuff costs just about $200 shipping costs if you take the slow route by sea. But I really like it as a good alternative for hammering the bedrock out, which will take at least a month or so. It's not nice for the whole region either, it creates a lot of noise.

Anyway... sofar so good, the whole island is still lush and green. In 2 days time more rain is expected, another 6 mm, but it could well be much more.