Hauling Water

Off Grid Utilities
2

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.

prespring

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.

spring2

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.

spring3

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:

DSC_0097

Share This:

2 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Off Grid Utilities
Sand Filter Diy

Filtering water is obviously very important. We started out with a Berkey water filter, as it was the best one we could find. Six years later, we still use it, but want to make the routinea little smoother. Let’s setup a sand filter. The water that goes into this filter …

Cooking
1
Cob Rocket Stove DIY: # 2

The cob rocket stoves we built last year were our first try with the cob. They worked pretty well, but we wanted to try and make them even better this year. Here goes: The rocket stove that we built out of fire bricks worked wonderfully.  It cost $60 though.  In …

Food Forest
1
5. Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services

The fifth permaculture principle is use and value renewable resources and services.  I know what you’re thinking, solar power! but it is so much more than that. We always try to make the most of our renewable reources here on the homestead for a few reasons.  Anything we can gather …