Eight Acres

This is a method that I use in hot weather so that I don't have to water every day.  With the holiday season coming up, the hardest thing about going on holiday is leaving my garden, particularly in hot weather, as I worry that it will dry out and all my hard work will whither and die.  We pay someone to come and check on the animals, but as we use grey water for the garden , if we're not home, there's no water to use on it (and we're not going to waste our good drinking water!). Some unusual plants popped up in our garden.... The solution came in a post from Emma at Craving Fresh .  She uses beer bottles full of water and pushed into the soil to keep it moist between watering.  I tried it the first time just before I knew I was going to be away for a few days.  Pete was going to be home, but not sure if he would get time to water, so I placed beer bottles full of water next to my favourite plants, just in case.  It was very hard to choose which ...

When I first wrote this post back in 2011, Queensland had too much water , but usually water is very precious to us.  Being in a rural area, we rely on our own rainwater supplies for drinking water and septic to treat our sewerage.  I’m quite happy with that arrangement, as it means we don’t have to drink the unnecessary levels of fluoride and chlorine in town water.  It also means that we have to ration our own water supply when the weather is dry and consider everything that we put down the drain.  I feel sorry for people in the city having water rationing forced on them through water restrictions, we just have to be responsible for our own use.  The funniest thing is that my first reaction now when it rains is to put on several loads of washing so that the water isn’t wasted by running out of our full tanks (luckily we have plenty of space on the verandah to hang it to dry). We had TOO much water in Dec/Jan 2011 At our previous property we also had t...

Windmills were once ubiquitous in the rural landscape, but you might have noticed something new appearing in their place. Increasingly farmers are choosing to replace old windmills and equip new bores and dams with solar panels instead. Like windmills, solar panels use renewable energy and have very low running costs. Solar panels and pumps, however, are now cheaper to set up and to maintain, giving them the advantage over windmills for remote applications. Even where access to grid electricity is available, with increasing electricity prices, the use of a free energy source is desirable. And they are far more practical than diesel or petrol pumps which must be attended regularly for starting, stopping, maintaining and refuelling.    The disadvantage of a solar pump, like a windmill, is that the power source is not always available on demand. A windmill will only pump water while the wind is blowing, and similarly, solar panels will only power a pump while the sun ...

If you want to move water from one place to another on your property, you will probably use poly pipe, or "ag" (agriultural) pipe.  Ag pipe comes in a range of sizes, from 3/4 inch to 2 inch nominal diamer, and in high and low pessure ratings (900 and 800 kPa respectively).  The larger the diameter, the more you will pay for the pipe and the fittings, but the less energy you will need to pump water through the pipe for a given flowrate. When you have decided what size pipe and which pressure you want, you will probably need some fittings.  The fittings are "compression" fittings, which means they use a "ferrule" and an o-ring compressed to the pipe to seal the fitting.  (Would you believe that there is a Wikipedia article that explains this ?).  When buying fittings, make sure you get the right size, and the right pressure rating, as its very difficult to get the high-pressure fittings to work with the low-pressure pipe! The high-pressure pipe has thi...

When buying a property is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that any water is good water. Unfortunately we learnt this the hard way. When we bought our property at Nanango, we thought the dam looked good and we would have plenty of water for the cattle, chooks and garden. The day we moved in with all our animals, our neighbour dropped by to tell us that our dam was saline. According to our neighbour, the previous owner had nearly ended up with two dead horses as they had refused to drink from the dam. We promptly tested the water with an electrical conductivity (EC) meter that we already owned from back when we grew hydroponic tomatoes (pre-blog days) and found that the water was indeed saline. It was OK for the cattle water, but no good for the chooks or garden. The most annoying thing was that we already owned the EC meter and hadn't thought to use it to test the water because we had no idea that dam water could be salty. Since then we have used it on several proper...

I realised that the rainwater in our new plastic water tanks was acidic when I wanted to test our garden soil pH and I couldn't get the pH meter to work properly.  I thought it was broken.  I recalibrated it several times, and still it was reading below pH 5 on water from the tap.  After some research, I realised that the pH meter wasn't broken, our rainwater really is that acidic. the water before treatment You've probably heard of acid rain.   Rain absorbs gases such as suphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere , which creates sulphuric, nitric and carbonic acids respectively.  In concrete water tanks, the acid dissolves the lime in the cement and returns the water pH to neutral (7), but that's why concrete tanks usually end up leaking.  Evidently a similar reaction occurs in rusty metal tanks, probably with the iron, as our water used to be pH 7 in the old tanks.  In plastic tanks, there is nothing to react, so the w...

"As I’ve written previously , secure water on your small farm is one of the most important inputs no matter if you just want a small vegetable garden or to keep livestock as well. One option is dam water, but on some properties the soil doesn’t hold water, and if you don’t get regular rain, dams can dry up. If you can find good bore water on your property, you are guaranteed a supply of water, even through a drought, however it is not always easy to find water underground." Read the rest of my article on Farmstyle What's your experience with bores and bore water?

We finally decided it was time to replace our old water tanks.  We've known we would need to do this since we moved in about four years ago.  The first week we owned the house, Pete was whipper snipping around the tanks and they sprung several leaks!  Since then we have regularly dealt with leaks by drilling in a tek screw.  They were gradually getting worse, and we recently had a hail storm that resulted in multiple leaks and one of our roosters had realised that he could just peck the tank when he got thirsty and make a giant chicken nipple.  Time to get some new ones! The reason the tanks were so leaky is that they were old metal tanks and must have been quite cheap at the time.  They were very very rusty.  The tanks store the rainwater that runs off our house and shed roofs.  They are our only source of drinking and household water.  Luckily we had one good tank that must have been installed later, so we knew we could just replace the t...

If you are interested in growing anything on your small farm, whether its just a vegetable garden, an orchard, or you want to keep some animals, you’re going to need to organise a source of water.  I've written an article on this topic for Farm Style, so pop over there to read the rest and leave any questions or comments here. Water for small farms Cheryl swimming and Chime not swimming in one of our dams for stock water

Until recently our “chicken watering system” was just buckets of water in each chicken tractor . One bucket for every 3-4 chickens, and 3-4 buckets of fresh water to top them up each day. We don’t have any taps in the paddock with the chickens, so this meant carrying water from the house tap to the chickens, a few hundred metres of walking for each load of buckets (welcome to the green gym). And then the chickens would regularly tip over the buckets, and the water got dirty very quickly and had to be tipped out anyway. This often meant a trip back to the garden with a bucket of dirty water (water is very precious here!). So there was a lot of water carting and water wastage.  The other annoying part is that we have to pull out all the buckets when we move the chicken tractor along every few days, and Bella the cow had a habit of trying to get to the buckets (she loves water from buckets) and tipping them over as well. a hen using the new system There had to be a better ...

A concept that is mentioned frequently in permaculture is “keyline”. I started reading about it when I reviewed “ catch and store energy ”, but I got stuck, and now that I’m up to “ design from patterns to detail ”, I thought that I'd better figure it out. What is keyline? P. A. Yeoman (1904 – 1984) was an Australian engineer and agronomist who lived and worked in New South Wales. He observed how water flowed over the land and developed a system for harnessing water to build soil fertility without chemicals, which he called the keyline system. A keyline plan is developed for a property using the concepts of the keyline system. His ideas are published in four books, three of which are available free online: Yeomans, P. A., The Keyline Plan (1954) Online version Yeomans, P. A., The Challenge of Landscape : the development and practice of keyline , Keyline Pub. Pty., Sydney, (1958). Online version Yeomans, P. A., The City Forest : The Keyline Plan for the Human Envir...

I've written before about water at our place , but I thought now was a good time to get into more detail after I read a post about the same topic by Frugal Queen .  She was talking about saving town water, but we have a slightly different focus. As you know, we are not on town water or sewage, so we have to manage our water use very carefully.  We have 3 22000 L water tanks that collect water from the roof of our house and our shed, and our waste water drains into a large underground septic tank , which has to be emptied every few years.  We use all our bath and washing machine water on the garden.  We built a system to drain the grey water into a drum under the house and then pump that up to the garden, this would be even better if the garden was downhill from the house and the water could just gravity feed straight to the garden.  Using the grey water on the garden means that we don't fill up the septic tank so quickly, and we always have plenty of...

When we buy our first mob of steers we want to keep them in the stock yards for a week or so, so we needed to set up water troughs in the stock yard.  There is a dam just near the stock yards, so we decided to install two 1000 L troughs and fill them from the dam using our dam pump.  In Australia, this type of pump is known as a "firefighter" pump , I don't know if that term is used in other countries as well.  It can be used for rural firefighting as you can just dump it into any dam, tank or swimming pool and suck out the water at a high flow rate.  It has a petrol engine, so it can be used anywhere, even if there's no electricity connected.  We usually leave it sitting next to the dam at "eight acres" so that we can pump water up to various troughs and old bathtubs that we use for stock water, but as we didn't want to buy a second pump, we put it on the ute and took it to the new property to fill the troughs.  It will live on the back of the ute while...