This Sustainable House

Posts Tagged ‘rain’

Every weekend I set myself a task to complete around TSH that keeps the vision moving in the right direction. Sometimes this task is large, such as fencing a new paddock, but at other times it can be quite small such as improving an existing system. This weekend, my task was to build a new vege garden using the wicking bed system.

A wicking bed is a marvellously efficient garden design in which you water from below. It is basically a giant self-watering pot in which you water via a filling tube. The water creates a reservoir under the soil of the bed, and the water then ‘wicks’ up to water the plants. The major advantage of the system is that there is no free water on the surface, so evaporation is minimal.

At TSH we have two beds, both located on the back verandah, which have been designated to be wicking beds. And this weekend I created one of the beds. The location of the beds was chosen so as to allow year round growing (it’s under the eaves so shouldn’t be too effected by frost) as well as to be close to the kitchen (virtually in zone 0, if you are permaculturally inclined). It should also help reduce the amount of reflected sunlight into the entertaining area during summer which should help make this area feel much more comfortable.

And let’s not forget… produce a mass of picking greens, herbs and other vegetables for the kitchen.

A video-essay of the building of this bed can be found on Green Phoenix Permaculture.

I’ll post an update in a few weeks around how it is going. Below are some time staged photos… click on them to zoom.

Wicking Bed (Week 1)

Only last night I uploaded the weather data to the website, and this morning we had SOME. I have to admit though, that I’m terribly glad that I haven’t yet planted out my pumpkin seedlings, instead they are snug and warm in the greenhouse.

The reason I’m so glad is this morning I awoke to the oddest site… snow at Mulloon. In fact I had been lying in bed listening to the rain on the roof for a while, but then there was no sound. I could see the ‘rain’ falling, but in my sleep induced haze, didn’t put 2 + 2 together. In fact by the time I took the video below it began to be mixed with sleet.

Needless to say that snow at Mulloon isn’t a common occurrence, even in the dead of winter, so to have snow in mid-October is something of a treat. Unless, of course, those summer vegetables are already in the garden….

For those of you who have visited this website on a previous occasion, you will have noticed that a new page went live this evening. The new page details the local weather at TSH and can be found here or by using the tab on the top menu.

The weather page is connected to a sensor at TSH which electronically measures the temperature, humidity and rainfall on the property. At a later stage it’ll also measure wind speed and direction, but at this stage the anemometer isn’t working as well as it should.

The dials on the page will provide you with updates of the current weather, well a few minutes behind the current weather anyhow. There is also a graphs button that will allow you to choose graphs of historical information (when there is some historical information) and a page of records for the site. You can also change the units to any units that make you feel most comfortable. Finally there is an option to go into full screen mode to make it easier to read.

Please check out the weather page and let me know what you think.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had created a pair of ‘sacrificial paddocks’ for the cattle. Well recently the cattle have been moved out of these paddocks, and one has been sown to a spring pasture mix (comprised of forage brassica, plantain and clover). This video highlights how the paddocks were sown, without the use of any mechanical apparatus apart from a rake, and how they are growing.

And they said it couldn’t be done…

Or perhaps, mote accurately, collect water while the rain falls…

Water is the number one limiting factor at TSH, as it is for most Australian farmers. We are, after all, the driest inhabited continent on Earth.

Like most rural properties, TSH has no reticulated water access but relies on the water that can be collected off the roof or catchment run-off. In the case of roof run-off the water is stored in a series of thanks with approx 140,000L capacity. However catchment run-off is a different tale with main storage being one medium sized delapidated dam. Damn!

The fact that our dam doesn’t hold water, if you’ll excuse the obvious pun, is actually a blessing as it encourages me to be more creative with how water is stored on the property. Which brings me to the point of this post… Swales!

Swales are an earthwork designed to capture water in-situ and transmit that into the sub-soil. Whilst in a dam one attempts to capture water with an impervious layer, in the case of a swale we capture it with a permeable layer. The basic principle, as demonstrated below, is to trap rainwater using trenches/embankments placed along a contour and then allow this water to permeate into the soil where it flows under the surface. This has the advantage of lowering evaporative losses as well as placing the water right where our plants need it, at their roots. It also reduces erosion and, best of all, requires NO energy to run a pump… Grand.

In the case of TSH there are a couple of areas that would benefit from swaling. The first area is in the quarantine yards where the swales will capture road run off and direct it to a better use. The second area is the rear paddocks where the run-off can be chanelled along the countours to collect both from the ‘interswale’ areas and the neighbours paddock.

As we develop these earthworks I will post additional comments but in the meantime just imagine the possibilities.