Bathing the bills away

When faced with imminent and enormous vet bills all a girl can do is grab a glass of wine, and have a long hot soak in a rainwater bath laced with James Wong's Chamomile Bath Milk.

On the subject of rainwater, with another 40mm or so having fallen in the last week the big tank filled up again, so we pumped some more water up the hill to the garden tanks. Lovely.

Tanked!

No, no, I haven't been hitting the wine again...at least not this early in the day  :) We had the water tank installed today!

At 6:15am it looked like this .... just a pile of nicely compacted sand

At 6:30am the truck arrived. Who would have thought it would all fit on such a small vehicle?! It's hard to see $9,500 in it, isn't it?

And then away they went. It was all over by 11:30am.

 

And here's the "action" side  - ladder, hatch, and all the inlet and outlets. We're just filling to the warranty required level from the bore for now, until we get the gutters plumbed in, the pump moved and the piping sorted.

The nice thing is that I can now say with some degree of truth that I have a water view from my kitchen window!!

On our way to greater water security, part 1

Today has been just crazy! At one stage on site we had 5 men, 1 tip truck, 3 utes, 1 large flat bed truck, a trencher / mini excvating machine and a mini bulldozer. Poor Jerry was very sad to be at work and miss all the fun.

Why all the men and machines? Well apart from the obvious (grin) today while work on the laundry renovation continued, work on the site for the water tank began. After our Home Sustainability Assessment last last year we opted to take out a green loan to allow us to do this now rather than keep saving. The great thing about these loans is that they are fee-free and interest free, so it is not costing us anything more to do it this way compared to saving the money in the bank (other than lost interest I guess).

So today we've gone from this

via this

 

to this

This is about the only flat spot on the whole property  :)

For those of you thinking that this is a huge space..you're right!  The sand pad area needs to be at least 10m in diameter. The tank itself has a diameter of 8m, and is 2.18m high. It will hold 110,000L of water, and will be connected to all the gutters on the house so we will finally be able to catch and store almost all of our rain. We will then use this in the house, except for the toilets, which will still run off the bore water.

Stay tuned for an update on the laundry renovations .............

So, when SHOULD we panic??

On Easter Saturday we went out with some friends for a paddle in our kayaks. We were going to go for a jaunt down the Murray, but alas the blue-green algae put paid to that trip.

Our back up plan was to go for a paddle on Lake Buffalo. We came here for fishing / a picnic between Christmas and New Year, and it was very pleasant. The upper reaches of the lake are far from the madding speedboats, and have pretty inlets to explore.

Doesn't it look pretty?

Well, yes and no - you would think it was lovely - snaking river, lush green banks, hills in the distance, but the scene shocked, horrified and, frankly, scared me more than a bit.

You see, we were here between Christmas and New Year, and the scene was very different. You can see where Jerry is standing in the left photo - 3 months ago his ankles would have been in the water. None of the bright green would be visible - it would all be under water. It's hard to tell from a photo but we estimated that was a drop of at least 8 meters in the water level. And to give you an idea of scale it took us about 5 minutes to drive to this part of the lake from the other end. That's A LOT of water that's gone.

A quick check of the water company site shows that since we visited the lake has gone from nearly 100% capacity to just over 30% - IN 3 MONTHS.

A quick tour around some other regional dams for our area shows:

• Lake Buffalo - 65% EMPTY
• Lake William Hovel - 64% EMPTY
  
• Hume - 98% EMPTY
• Dartmouth - 80% EMPTY

The numbers for Hume and Dartmouth are pretty scary when you realise that

"Hume Dam is the major operating storage of the River Murray system. The storage regulates the River Murray, and re-regulates water discharged from the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme.

Releases from Hume Dam and downstream tributary streams supply irrigation, domestic and stock and urban demands to Victoria and New South Wales, and provide about one-third of South Australia's entitlement. In very dry years, releases are made specifically for South Australian requirements and are supplemented by transfers from Dartmouth Dam."

So it's a major water supply for hundreds of towns, hundreds and thousands of people, parts of 3 states not to mention farmers and other agricultural industries in the area. And lets not forget that the Murray River is one of our largest and most important rivers. The fact that a huge tract of the Murray is effectively closed due to blue-green algae barely rates a mention in the news - it should be a front page national scandal. So should the fact that there isn't enough water to keep the river flowing and healthy.

And yet on the radio / news / in the papers we're told not to panic, and many of the major towns in the area are on stage 1 restrictions (or even no restrictions) - and they are still building new housing estates in the region to house more people. Oh, and lets not forget they're building a pipeline from our region to take water to Melbourne. Perhaps it's time to reconsider extending this up to QLD to take away some of their excess water?!

Surely it's time we all got serious about water? If it's not time to panic now (albeit a productive kind of panic that leads to useful action), when will it be?

November garden update

The garden is flourishing, thanks to some recent rain. Today I planted out 8 tomato plants - it might be a bit early but we're off to Tassie next week so am hoping they will just plod along in our absence. If we do get a late frost I can just replace them with one of the 50 or so other seedlings in the greenhouse!!


L to R: food garden entrance, brambleberries, raspberries


L to R: Onions, snow peas (mange tout), and potatoes along the fenceline


L to R: our first cherries!, our new 22,500 L water tank on the hill - will be hooked up in the next few weeks.

If you want to see pics of my recent trip to HK wander over to our flikr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/nigeandgabs/

April Garden

We have had some token rain, but not enough to make any real difference to the main garden...er dustbowl. Things are getting pretty grim for farmers and growers around here. So far we have water, but no idea for how long, so we are saving as much as possible. All the cold water before the hot comes through in the sink or shower, all rinse water, vege water. We've stopped using the dishwasher and I try to use the washing machine only once a
week. Every little helps (sorry Tescos!).

Jerry has been busy building in the garden. This time it's new garden beds using some pavers we got from one of his work colleagues, plus another rustic gate - this time for the fruit cage



Here are the latest garden pics -
cabbages, broad beans, radishes, turnips etc | tomatoes still ripening | super size me pumpkin!


Tomatoes (Amish Paste) and some Autumn colour in the brown brown garden