Construction on our new nursery at Theresa Park is progressing well. Our massive shade house has been completed after 6 weeks, to give you an idea of it's size, it has 1km of upright posts and over 16,000m2 of shade cloth.
Below is an extract from our article appearing in next months Australian Horticulture magazine.
Getting it right from the ground up.
Downes Wholesale Nursery are undertaking a massive 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. This series of articles by, Warren Downes deals with what it takes to set up a development of this scale and the advancements in practices and technology involved.
After 6 months of searching, trying to find a suitable property to expand our increasingly busy nursery we located a beautiful 145 ace property with over 1km of river frontage on the Nepean river and a 208 mega-litre water license.
Before construction could begin we had to work out a number of factors the biggest of which deals with water. We wanted to ensure a zero run off policy so we can recycle and purify all water run off and set the benchmark for other nurseries to follow with our water conservation policy. One of the biggest obstacles was controlling water flow, as the natural lie of the land did not fall as required. We enlisted the help of Glenn Fordham, of TRN Earthmoving who says, �T he most significant feature of this job was TRN being able to work with the client to achieve a workable outcome whereby acceptable surface grades were achieved whilst maintaining a cut/fill balance of approximately 90,000m 3 on site hence eliminating the need for expensive fill import/export operations. Some areas were able to be graded in a flat plane using conventional lasers. The larger areas had to be shaped to suit existing natural terrains hence involved using GPS technology to guide the machinery.
That process began by receiving a formatted Digital Terrain Model (DTM) of both the existing surface and indicative proposed works from the projects engineering consultant, Lean & Hayward. TRN�s
Surveyors then edited that data using 12D Model EngineeringSoftware so the information was suitable for construction purposes and could be viewed by the client prior to construction. The DTM is then transferred to site machinery via Secure Digital Card (or �SD Cards�).
