Water Is On Everyone's Mind Today

 Ludlow Creek

It has been a dry summer here in upstate New York. Not as bad as many other states though. I feel bad for the people suffering in Texas. One town has issued an order of watering restrictions. That is not that unusual in times of drought I am sure. When we lived in St. Petersburg, FL, we lived with drought conditions. It wasn't a hardship for us, as at that time, we didn't even have a garden.

 Sharing!

But one of the restrictions of this town in Texas, was that watering of livestock was prohibited. How can that be? We have three horses and a large dog. They drink a lot of water. Do you think I would refuse to give them water? No way! I'd make sure they had water. If I had to buy it from the store, as much as I hate those plastic bottles, I'd do it. I'd probably go broke doing that though since they can easily drink a five gallon bucket down in a few minutes. When you bring a bucket of water into the barn the first one to drink will usually drink the whole bucket down. Then it is two more trips to the pump before you are done hauling water.

Our Pitcher Pump

There are ways to conserve water in times like this. For us, since our water has to be pumped and carried means we are used to using less water than most people. When we take showers in the summer, we use green soda bottle that sit in the sun all day. My son just took a shower and said it was hot. I use 6 bottles usually, sometimes less, but never more than that.

You may have read my post, Gray Water System For Watering The Garden, that I wrote in April of this year. I told about my husband putting a drain from the house sinks and bath tub to our raised beds. When we empty the sink or tub, the water goes somewhere that it is needed. We are very conservative with the water. Cleaning the horses' water buckets means dumping the dirty water onto our raised beds or trees.

 All that snow melts into our ground water table!

 

Copyright © 2011 Kathleen G. Lupole
All Photographs Copyright © 2011 Kathleen G. Lupole
 

Gray Water System For Watering The Garden

The ditch from the house.

 

 

 

 

Since our house has never had any plumbing in it since it was first built in 1850, we are the first to have felt the need for it. When we purchased this house it had only been used as a hunting camp since 1923. It had and still does have an outhouse. But when we moved in I wanted some things to make living here easier. For instance, there was a sink in the kitchen but the drain just went through a hole in the wall to the outside. No proper run off area! I wanted to use it. Not have to use dishpans and carry them outside to empty them when I finished.

He deserves a break after digging this ditch!

 

 

 

So my husband dug a ditch, and had the drain from the bathtub, (that we put in the downstairs bedroom to make it into a bathroom), and kitchen sink empty into those drains. The ditch that they emptied into was deep and below the frost line, so they would not freeze during the winter. Well, what happened instead was after eleven years, that ditch got the ground above it waterlogged. So it was kind of swampy last summer, not real bad, I have seen worse but not ours. So my husband decided to make more runoffs from the main drain. And he directed them directly to our raised beds out back which could always use that water.

PVC pipe going underground.

He dug the ditch directly to the raised bed. Then he laid pipe and inserted it in the middle of a rock wall that he built underneath the raised bed. He has plans to dig another ditch to the other raised beds. Leading to underneath the bed, the water draining from the sinks and bathtub will go there. It will help with the watering of the raised beds when they need water.

Two pipes going to two different raised beds.

This method is called a dry well, I believe. It has no black water, just gray water, and I use mostly environmentally friendly products. So this has many pluses for us. And most important was that we needed drains for our sinks and tub. That is the answer. If you move into a house like we did without any at all………it gets old very quickly, having to empty your water outside. The bath tub? Could never have done that, period! The drains made it possible for us to use a bath tub for showers and baths right from the start. Living this way is not bad if you can be clean, and not have mountains of work just because you want to take a shower or a bath.

Pipe going in underneath the bed.

 

 

I have been looking forward to getting running water in the house. But these drains to the dry well are part of our permanent system. They will not change. Even after we get everything all done they will stay in place. I am happy that the water coming from them will be doing a extra duty. Not having to water those raised beds all summer will be good when there are droughts here. We usually are blessed with much rain here in New York state so I don’t usually worry too much about watering. But if you live in an area where water is hard to come by this could be an option for you.

Copyright © 2011 Kathleen G. Lupole
All Photographs Copyright © 2011 Kathleen G. Lupole