This one's not for vegetarians

30kg of local lamb - $5.50 per kg, cut and packed to order. I'm happy with that!

2009-10 Harvest tally

I realised a few days ago that I didn't post the final harvest tally for our main crops for the season. Here it is...

Yep, we really did grow 167kg of tomatoes. I was pretty sick of them by the end of March :-). We're still picking potatoes so the actual harvest is more than the chart indicates, but a lot of them were "glassy" and not edible which is very frustrating. Once again capsicums weren't spectacular in spite of having a lot of plants, but the eggplants were just amazing this year.

How did your garden do?

AT LAST

And no, I don't mean at last I've made a post here (been enjoying a little blogging holiday, and not much happening in winter to report).

drum roll please

As of about 15 minutes ago our house is running on 100% rainwater!!!!! I am VERY EXCITED by this development, after a few years of wanting to do this, all the preparation work (rehanging gutters, putting on gutter mesh, earthworks, tank installation, plumbing and more earthworks etc)and about 6 months of waiting to get enough water in the big tank to do it. We had 30mm of rain a few weeks ago and the tank is now half full (it's a 110,000l tank) so we were good to finish the conversion. The lovely Jim came along today and moved the house pump down to the shed (near the tank) and connected everything up.

There are so many good things about this 

• No more bore water in the house! 
• No more discolouration in the bath and sinks from the minerals in the bore water
• We can pump from the big tank to the two 22,500L tanks on the hill to store as much rainwater as possible over our main rain months (Jul-Oct) - which means we could also gravity-feed rainwater into the house if the power is out.
• We may even have enough water to use just rainwater in the garden - we'll have to see how that goes over summer
• Guilt free baths!!!!!
• The pump is now at the bottom of the garden rather than very close to our bedroom which makes for a quieter life all around.

Can we collect enough water to be totally self sufficient? Yup, with a roof of about 330m2, average rainfall of about 650 (don't believe the bureau figures of 1000!), and estimating that we actually collect 90% of the rain that falls on the roof (evap, first flush etc) we could collect about 193,000, yep 193,000L of water per year. We can potentially store 155,000l of that at any one time.

Pretty good eh?

And worst case scenario we can still access the bore water by the turn of a lever (we have no mains water supply) - but given there are only 2 of us I don't think we'll ever get to this point...

I'm off to celebrate with a nice big guilt-free bath!!!!!!!!!!!