Send her down, Huey!

At about lunchtime on Tuesday, I rose from my sickbed (nasty 'flu) to take delivery of and wrestle into position with the driver a second rainwater tank that would double our storage to 25,000 Litres - all of it off the roof of 'Australia's best shed'...

Once I've installed the new pump (a 1 a.m. excursion to the tank site with Bianca to tie the beast down with chains against a gale did nothing for my 'flu) , my wife and patient partner for the past 41 years will be able to water our fruit trees and her vegie garden with a hose, rather than traipsing back and forth between tank and trees for hours with a watering can.

Mind you, we've been on town water for a dozen or so years now, ever since - faced with a decision to spend say $300 a year to let the water main go PAST the property, or spend say $345 a year to have it connected - I installed 300 metres of 40 millimetre 'ag pipe' to the home site in the bush and let the water guys put in their meter.

There is, sadly, NO incentive for installing rainwater storage, so our $3500-odd investment in tanks and pump will never become amortised. (We spend around $60 a quarter on the water bill, only about $16 of which is for actual use - 11 to 33 kilolitres at about 81 cents each. The rest is a quarterly access charge of $65.50 that's payable whether we shower or not :-); a $21.88 pension rebate comes off the bill.)

Greywater
Our kitchen, washing machine and bath greywater no longer goes into the 3000 Litre septic tank but, via a grease trap, into a pebble bed planted with 'suitable' species. Our council, which charges a yearly $32 'onsite sewage Management/Approval Charge', doesn't realise this yet. No doubt they'll have their own ideas about our system...

I tried to interest our water utility in a thin tome on greywater management I picked up in the U.S. but had no reaction. This doesn't surprise me, since this same mob stubbornly used to run automatic sprinkler systems on the tiny pumping stations greens along the highway even during water restrictions for their customers AND while it rained!

Lawns
We have some 300-400 square metres of grassy surfaces around home, shed and gardens. This NEVER gets watered, and is rarely mowed. It provides green feed for 18 free-rangeing hens and their two roosters, as well as for 5 very picky geese. Swarms of redbrowed finches descend on the long swards in autumn; they enjoy landing near the tips of the leaves of grasse, thus bending them down with their tiny weight, and then keep them 'nailed' to the ground with their feet while they pick the seeds off at leisure. I wish our hens had been able to copy this neat trick...

The grass surface provides another great service: they prevent the instant runoff you'd otherwise get during our often (not often enought right now) heavy downpours!

To sum up: we do all these things on ecological principles rather than to save water - much like we used to cart up bins full of organic 'waste' from Balmoral for more than 15 years during monthly visits to "the land". (This left many seedling apple and citrus trees to grow at will - but unfortunately may also have brought in the fruit fly plague we are now trying to eradicate. Organically, of course!)

Cheers!