All winter long we have had to buy water. We have not yet put in a cistern and it is too cold to put your hand into the stream to fill jugs. It is still pretty cold and there is no way to get the car down to the stream yet, but we are sick of buying water. Until the cistern gets put together, we need something else.

The Man went out wandering the property in hopes of finding some water flow closer to the house where we could collect water. He managed to find a tiny spot where the water flowed over rocks in such a way that he could get a gallon jug under the flow and catch it very nicely. He managed to clean the area enough to get the trickle to pick up a just a little bit.

It takes about ten minutes for the jug to fill, but you don’t have to sit there and hold it the whole time. He wanders that area while the jugs fill, cleaning up the brush and branches that are in his path. It’s starting to look pretty good down there.

The site of this water is just beyond the site of the new house, which will be great once we move down there, many years from now. It isn’t too far a walk, and carrying four water jugs at a time, it doesn’t take much longer than it would to go down to the stream. Plus, you can just sit and enjoy the quiet while the jugs fill, if you want to.

Here is last years failed attempt at rainwater collecting.

Now that we have a nice path to our water source, I am going to start planting some cover crops along the other paths and anywhere else we may want some grass. Here is the clay that I will need to turn into rich soil for my grass: