Precious Water
Our water is harvested from the roof during rain and is caught and stored in water tanks. In very wet conditions, a lot of rain we find that we don't have sufficient tanks, and the water run off ends up in a dam at the bottom of the property. All the water on the 40 acres doesn't go into that dam. To contain the water from the whole property and allow none to travel down through the usually dry creek and into the dams of people who live further down the mountain from us, we would need 4 dams.
We don't do this, the first and main reason being:
- that we don't want to keep all the water that falls as rain and runs off from our property and deprive those further down the foothills
- we want to allow the dry gullies to once more become wet and therefore function as nature intended
- we are not greedy
- there is also always the lack of money, but even with sufficient money we would not entertain the idea.
We would have to build dams and improve the clay of the dam with something like bentonite clay. The soil where the dams would be built are not water holding soils. We could place the dams into clay and use water races to direct the run off into the dam that way.
The dam we have built has or rather had, a water race leading past it with flags that would direct the water into it. At the start, after the first flush of water, it with all the debris on the water race was allowed to pass by and run into the gully off the property. Then when the water was clear, we would direct it into the dam with flags.
However we have so little water that actually runs off that we have abandoned the flags and directly feed even the first flush of water carrying sticks and leaf matter into the dam. We hope the water creatures find these as food and homes and this material will hopefully not be so plentiful that it will fill our dam with a rich soil.
Our water to the cottage is gravity fed from header tanks that are higher on the slopes.
We use a gas, on demand water heater. That way we think we conserve and husband energy.
Our washing machine is modern, with reasonable rating for water and electricity use and has many settings which allow us to try to use the least possible water and power. We have solar power over deep cycle batteries with a generator backup.
Water Use:
[quote]
All water that is piped into homes in the UK is treated to very high EU quality standards. Much of the water we use domestically is consumed in non-potable uses such as gardening and flushing toilets. Only uses including drinking, cooking and for baths and showers need to be potable for health reasons. These uses account for only around one third of total supply.
[end quote]
We don't treat our water, but as the air becomes more and more polluted there is a chance that our rain water will pick up pollution from the air. Already people are talking about acid rain, and that could be a problem even in our environment in the future.
We don't have a flush toilet. We have a dry toilet and allow the material to become plant nutrient by composting in the soil. We just refuse to use good quality rain water to flush away our personal waste. By not doing so we improve the nutrition and water holding capacity of our dry soils.
Living with a finite water supply:
We live with an unpredictable and unreliable water supply. That means we gauge the weather constantly and attempt to make certain that we have enough water in reserve for such things as fire fighting, in case a fire should impact our home. We adjust our water usage by the amount that's available, we have shorter showers, save our household shower and washing water to water the plants as the water supply gets less.
Often rain is forecast, but we also know the forecasters, they are generally wrong, so it's up to us in the main. We have to take responsibility for the things that many people take for granted and if there is insufficient, have someone to complain to. We have only ourselves to blame and that makes us a bit more careful a bit more frugal, but we have an internal water gauge, the same as we have an internal power meter. Knowing just how much water we are using and how much electricity we are using when we have a laptop computer or washing machine or both on at the same time.
It's not particularly clever, just something that develops with time and we don't think anything of it any more.
Water Footprint:
The end result said: Your total water footprint = 2074 cubic meter per year.
Laughing. I suddenly realised that ours is not going to be average.
We do one load of washing each day, and that's mostly for soiled animal bedding. We are a wildlife shelter and so our dairy, or marsupial milk replacer consumption is higher. I also realise that I drink about 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day, does that really lift the bar? Not the water in my cup, but the water used in the production of the coffee bean and the process that grinds it? Maybe even the water beneath the keel of the boat that carries it across the ocean. [laughing]
We eat a lot of vegetables but very little if any meat at any time. Not because we don't like it, but because we can't afford it, we have marsupial milk replacer and food to buy. Meat is so expensive buy. So when we do eat meat, usually we kill our own sheep and poultry. Eat a lot of eggs during spring and summer that our free range Pekin bantams produce.
So what else is making this much water use? I drink about 2 litres of water a day, sometimes more depending what I doing outside in the warmer months and 1 litre or more a day during the winter. I don't think our dam holds that much [2074 cubic metres] water, our water tanks hold about 12,000 gallons of water, 5,000 of that is never touched, held for fire fighting.
It seems to me it's more to do with what commercial growers use to grow the vegetable plants the people want. There are better ways to grow vegetables than the French raised bed method, though it's easier to lose vegetable crops in a wet year if grown in a different way. There is a requirement to have a better idea of weather conditions that might present in the future if vegetables are not grown on a raised bed.
Hydroponics might be a better use of water?
Our apple trees are not irrigated and we have about 25 varieties. In a drought they lose all their apples before the birds can get get them. Most other years we lose a lot to the crimson rosella's and bower birds. We have to start looking at nets to keep the birds off the ripening fruit. Making nets might use a lot of water.
We have bees, and they do use water, but I'm not certain of their consumption, maybe not that much as they could find evaporation of moisture from the nectar to produce the honey is enough for their needs?
Our vegetables are grown with less water than some people use. But then our crops and vegetables are not as large as some, and sometimes a little more fibrous.
Did the guide on the page take an average of how vegetables were grown commercially? Was water wastage taken into account? I have seen market gardens that have water flowing down the paths between the rows as the sprinklers just keep pumping it out. There is a lot of water wastage.
We never wash cars, except in the rain and we don;t have any driveway aprons or such to wash down.
Anyway, the amount above was presented when I did the survey.
The language of food.
The language of food for us is simple instruction.
We eat what we can afford, mainly what we can grow and a great deal of what we can buy cheaply trying to maintain a reasonably low level of fat, sugars and salt in any processed food we buy.
It's not rocket science really. We bottle fruits that grow on our trees that the birds have left for us. Wild craft asparagus, cherry plums, mushrooms. blackberries, rose hips and anything else that we find in the area round us.
These “natural” foods often seen as weeds rather than plants out of place are shunned by many who find it quaint that anyone would eat these things. The danger is that farmers spray blackberries that cover areas of pasture which doesn't yield as much in volume of grass as the berry thicket.
Wasteland, what a crazy term, grows much of this food. It's there for the taking and is taken by people who are aware of its value.
The food we eat probably shows that we are not well off financially or as I think, that we have other priorities that must attract our money. We are fortunate in that we never go hungry, and though we may not feed on caviar or such luxuries, are not deprived in any way having hardly ever tasted them even as an experiment.
There is no security, so therefore there can be no food security for the simple reason of weather, though not alone. Pollution of areas previously clean and the madness of price and price wars that impact not only on food for the consumer, but food production. What we really need is food adaptability.
I have always been of the opinion that food should be eaten as was intended since time began, in season. When apricots are ripening, they should become a staple with any other food that's coming into the season. Spring and summer is the time to eat eggs, and winter is the time to kill and out aside meat, in the cold climates the animal fats that will keep people warm.
Since modern times we have no more need of the animal fats as most people heat their houses so that they can walk round in shirt sleeves in every part of it. This isn't the way humans evolved, there was a time when we needed to put on more clothes, but now summer is all year round.
If we move back a bit, and use the seasons as a guide, we wouldn't be pulling food from across the seas, where the growers might be using chemicals banned in our own country and many more things like that.
Further to this, if technology is sustainable then how physically strong and big do people have to be? To reduce the body size will also mean in most cases, reducing the food consumption size.
Waste is a real problem and there are many people who already look through the rubbish skips of larger supermarket chains to find the food marked as not suitable for sale, but quite edible, though in most cases the packaging is just broken and in the most sever cases the food might just need a bit of attention to remove parts that are either unsightly or slightly off.
Food Sources Ignored.
Looking at the Mesolithic food pyramid one wonders that it wasn't what created the more active brain activity which is exhibited in humans and yet doesn't happen in the apes. Though the apes do eat small amounts of meat, consuming mainly meat in the form of flesh from fish and other animals and birds was probably the difference, and if the truth be known is important for the developing brain of the child? Just an idea.
So where do we go from here, where the grains nuts and vegetables are the most sustainable as far as land use is concerned?
There are many pests that are edible and just killed and allowed to rot. Foolishness that makes no sense, locusts being one such, feral pigs in places all over my country, deer of various kind that are shot and killed only so their heads can be caped out and hung as a trophy on a wall. Even wildlife like kangaroos are culled and allowed to rot, instead of being used as all creatures should be to give their lives and deaths meaning and purpose.
Rabbits have been poisoned and inflicted with disease myxomatosis and calcivirus [Viral Haemorrhaging Disease] rather than harvested for food. Yet it's well documented that in earlier times poor Australian farming families lived on rabbits, many have used the skins of rabbits in past decades to better their financial situation.
The situation with people now expecting to buy the “bred” or manufactured is something that has developed and even been encouraged by the government. Few people keep cows for milking even on farms and most hobby farmers don't even keep a got or two for milking or sheep for house rations. It seems people are afraid of what? Disease?
I wonder how many people died of zoonosis in the days of yore?
Though they are so versatile and food valuable, few people keep poultry, preferring to put their scraps which are generally too plentiful, into bins to go into landfill.
Pigeons are good to eat labelled a pest and no longer kept and eaten. The advantages of many of these feral and other animals that take very little maintenance and supply rich and varied sources of protein are seldom part of the modern families lifestyle. Milk and eggs both come from the supermarkets in cartons, albeit a bit different to one another.
Many reasons can be found why we don't use a local resource. There is the killing and cleaning actions most people don't enjoy because they may get dirty or they can't eat a cute and cuddly rabbit, but can buy and eat lamb chops. These are meat and they are divorced from the image of a lamb frolicking in amongst the spring flowers on the pasture. Denial? Convenience?
Food Depletion.
Having been born to parents who came through and survived a war, I have found myself like them, looking at things differently. All food is good and as we all know, food is medicine. If it sustains us, supplies our needs and satisfies our taste food of any kind serves the purpose.
Usually the people who have a food “culture” know how to preserve the source of that food by not over harvesting or such. There are certain things that must be observed which cannot always be controlled if many people, not versed in the food sources need harvest it. Things like asparagus must not be harvested for at least the first year and every year after that it's wise to allow the last spears of the season to remain unharvested and to grow as the plant intended to replenish it's roots with food ready for next years growth.
Is there any food of my culture that is not sustainable? All food, if the population keeps growing and eats all the breeders as well as the seed. Not allowing plants to regain their strength before harvest the following year. Cloning plants that will not be able to adapt to the changing conditions they find through their seed.
Artificially inseminating animals with what appears to be a sire of desirable traits that could be later discovered to have some hidden flaw, as has happened in the dairying industry. Food sources are threatened if we restrict diversity, if we think we know best in a world we don't know very well.
Cloning and artificial insemination is madness. Science responding to treating the symptom rather than the cause. Though that's what science is best at and of course gets us into trouble. Was DDT the first of these things that made us start to suspect science, or was that the atomic bomb?
So.........
It's really the never ending story of humanity being so superior that we think we know everything. That we think depositing out bodily wastes into the sea or rivers or such places is acceptable because out of sight out of mind? We believe that if we buy “meat” we don't have to think of the things that were done to animals to put this product into the butcher shops or supermarkets. That we can just poison pest or feral animals and leave them to rot instead of eating them where they are food very suitable for human beings. Thus creating a double cost, the cost of the toxic chemicals that are manufactured and labour to administer them out in the field and the damage to the environment.
That the energy we use is not so bad but is wasteful at the moment, that governments don't subsidise or encourage renewable energy and most politicians are not even aware what that is.
There are things we can do better. Not use computers would be a good energy saver. [laughing] But using a laptop is better for us because we have solar only power, and of course in our heads is a metre that records what we are plugging into power sockets, turning off all “standby” appliances and generally aware of our electricity use.
We are the same with water. Very frugal use of water and using water twice if that's possible and it is in some instances.
Waste? Well there is waste. The kitchen waste goes out to the poultry and water fowl and dogs, the human waste gets buried in the ground where the soil flora and fauna compost it and create a beautiful fertiliser for plants. Mainly for trees and pasture grasses, and the animals that eat these feed us with flesh and eggs. In the case of poultry they also keep the pests away from the vegetables we grow, and supply other rich sources of manure to sustain these plants.
We see plants out of place as something desirable. There is a little work involved to keep blackberry thickets at a reasonable size by allowing sheep and goats to keep them trimmed, subsidising the animals feed. The few thistles that grow as a source of nectar and pollen for the bees and and so are not useless, nor do they need destroying, because the grasses grow vigorously and there are little open earth in which they can take a hold.
Water is stored in food grade polypropylene tanks and is our main water supply.
We have satellite television and internet connection and live simply, in that we don't go out to restaurants or plays or the movies.
I think that we have much to learn from nature. The bee and ant colony, the forests the pasture. The way things grow in natural harmony which includes rivalry and even wars, there is survival and sustainability.
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