Top nursery trusts Rain Bird technology to do the watering

Downes Wholesale Nursery are undertaking a massive new development of a 145 acre property at Theresa Park in Sydney’s west, developing it into one of the largest wholesale nurseries on the east coast of Australia. The task will be made easy with the installation at the new site of a Rain Bird central control system for single site applications known as Site Control.

Site Control offers powerful central control features for single, large contiguous site applications. It provides dynamic map-based control and instantaneous exchange of information between the field and the central computer. Rain Bird Site Control can control two-wire decoders, satellite controllers or both for unmatched expandability and flexibility.

Downes have chosen a Site Control system with a Small Decoder Interface Unit (SDI) which can interface with up to 200 decoder addresses and activate up to 400 solenoids. With state-of-theart ET-based scheduling, customised site graphics, multiple mapping options and the ability to ‘see’ the placement and operation of individual valves and sprinklers, the system makes controlling irrigation precise, fast and intuitive.

The system will be used in conjunction with Rain Bird LF1200 sprinklers which are designed for high uniformity so all container pots are evenly wetted.

Warren Downes, owner of Downes Nursery stated, ‘This sprinkler is a low flow head and has a good size droplet with no misting.’Warren also stated that, ‘Being a low flow sprinkler the LF1200 does have much longer run times than other impact sprinklers to achieve the same application rate. Run times will be up to 1 hour in summer, compared to around 20 minutes using other overheads sprinklers. This gives the advantage of better penetration and uniformity.You only have to tip a bucket of water over a lawn to see how a fast application will run off rather than penetrate the soil.’

Site Control also features Rain Bird’s sophisticated Smart Weather™ technology which reacts to current weather conditions through logical sequential steps. It adapts irrigation rates to levels of rainfall and can even provide automatic frost protection which is so important in the nursery industry.

For further information on Downes Nursery visit their website www.downesnursery.com.au or call (02) 9606 5044.