rain at last!

It's raining!!!! There are two reasons why this has caused great excitement in our house in the last 24hrs. Firstly we've been desperately needing it for weeks: the ground was parched and cracked, the veg garden was suffering, the fire risk has been extreme and the farmers around here were getting anxious. The second reason is we have two new rainwater tanks - 2,000 litres capacity collecting off one side of the garage roof. With what has fallen in the last 24hrs we've already got about 100lt in there which is pretty good going for mostly fairly light rain.

I emptied the kitchen scraps bucket on to the compost heap this afternoon and went to wash the bucket out from the hosepipe when I realised I could use collected rainwater instead, much better to be chucking the swilled out contents on to the garden without the added extras of chlorine and whatever else goes into our tap water to make it taste so disgusting before it is filtered! It'll probably be a while before we have enough in the tanks to run a hose off it, but even just to be able to fill up a watering can or bucket is great.

It's just a small step towards improving our footprint on the earth, We've got re-purposed sorbitol tanks set up, they're sitting on some old concrete fence posts laid down on the bare earth. A few fixings and a short length of alkathene pipe and hey presto! Jess had fun with the gold spraypaint sealing all the joints in the galvanised cages the tanks sit in so hopefully it should last a good few years. What's more Oscar traded a supply of firewood sustainably cut from their land (mostly storm-fall plus thinnings) in exchange for the tanks so we supported alternative economies, re-purposed materials and reduced our tap water consumption all in one project! That's pretty good I reckon. A shame Phyllis had to wait 30yrs to get the rainwater tanks she wanted but at least it has happened whilst she's still living here.

Now to figure out if we can squeeze another tank or two in somewhere to collect the water off the other side of the garage, or the house...

Oscar with Chris & Jess moving the tanks into position 

All in place and waiting for rain to fall...