What is a swale?

• A perfectly level ditch, following the contour of the land.

(diagram from Toby Hemenway’s excellent book, Gaia’s Garden)

What does a swale do?

• Water harvesting: captures surface water flowing downhill during rain.
• Slows the movement of surface water across the landscape, putting it to use rather than just letting it flow off.
• Spreads the water evenly along the length of the swale. Water will naturally flow into gullies and away from ridges – swales redistribute it more evenly.
• Holds water for some time (usually days, up to a week) after a rain event, allowing it to slowly infiltrate into the ground.
• Hydrates the slope below the swale, storing water in the soils and sediments underground.
• You won’t need to water even the most fussy plants on a swale for a few weeks after a rain event – more hardy plants won’t ever need watering.

How do you build a swale?

• Start by marking out where it will go – dumpy level/a-frame, clear hose, builder’s level on plank, laser level. Use little flags or pegs to mark the uphill edge of the swale.
• Dig a trench along the marked line, piling the removed soil on the downhill side of the trench to make a mound.
• Think about what will happen if the swale overflows – plan a spillway that won’t erode during high flow, and ensure that the water that exits won’t cause problems downhill.
• Make the bottom of the trench level.
• Crack/chip the bottom of the swale to aid water infiltration.
• You can completely fill the swale with mulch (leaves, sticks, wood, bark, etc) (good for smaller swales) or leave a trench/gullly that will fill with water.
• Mulch the swale mound well to prevent weeds and erosion.
• Plant legumes on the mound (pigeon pea, cow pea, clover, tagasaste, wattle, etc) to build soil nitrogen and act as nursery trees for your crop species. These can be “chopped and dropped” as mulch during the life of the swale.
• Plant fruit and nut trees on the top of the mound (for plants that like drainage) and below the mound (for plants that like moisture).
• Build successive swales down a slope, giving consideration to how they overflow into one another.
• Space neighbouring swales widely on shallow slopes, closer together on steeper slopes.
• Important: Plant out and mulch the swale immediately after construction so you don’t have to fight with weeds later!

Potential problems with swales

• If you don’t get the levels right, you can get a heavy flow of water along your swale and concentrate it to the overflow point, which might cause problems downhill. Even worse, it might burst through the mound somewhere along the swale and erode it out.
• If you don’t plant trees below the swale, you’ll cause waterlogging by infiltrating more water than grasses and small plants can absorb.
• High evaporation can cause salt buildup. You need to ensure the base of the swale is not sealed like a dam, but allows slow infiltration of water. Trees help take up the water and shade the trench to reduce evaporation. Water lost to evaporation is water not used!
• Get the overflow point right! Make sure it won’t erode during high rainfall (e.g. line a sill with rocks or pavers, or use buried overflow pipe through the mound). Plan where you’re directing the overflow water, and ensure a heavy storm won’t cause downhill problems.
• Don’t allow plants to grow thickly and clog up your overflow points.

My backyard swale, planted with taro, bananas, mango, and sweet potato.

More swale ideas

• Make swales a generous width, fill them with wood chips or green waste mulch to level the surface, and use them as access paths. Water will be held in the mulch, reducing evaporation and encouraging beneficial fungi (mycorrhiza), but the top layer will be dry for walking on.
• Similar to above, dig ditches on contour in your vegetable garden beds and fill them with mulch as access paths.
• Create crescent-shaped mini-swales for individual trees. They’ll collect water (possibly from a wide area) and concentrate it for infiltration just uphill of the tree.
• Direct swale overflows into water features, dams, rain gardens, banana circles, or (if you don’t have any other options) stormwater drains.
• Direct greywater (from laundry, outdoor showers, etc) into a slotted irrigation pipe that runs along the bottom of a swale. Cover the pipe with lots of wood chips and mulch, so the greywater won’t sit at the surface.
• Road or driveway runoff and rainwater tank overflows can also be directed into swales.
• On rocky ground that can’t be dug (or if you don’t have the time and energy!), place fallen trees, branches, sticks and rocks along contours (across the slope) and fill behind them with mulch, compost, dirt, rocks, etc. When it rains, more silt will wash down the slope and build up behind the branches, creating a swale-like mound.
• Plant water-loving plants (taro, rice, kangkong, lillies) in the swales, and moisture-loving plants (asaparagus, mints, blueberries, bananas, ginger) just above the swale flood level.
• In large swale systems, small dams or pools can be created by deepening and widening the trench at intervals. This would create a string of ponds that link up during rain events, much like billabongs along a river.
• Swales are starting to be used in urban planning to reduce water flows, nurture street trees, and reduce the amount of water going into stormwater systems.
• Aim to keep all the water that falls on your land, on your land!

Related posts:

1. Mulch Delivery
2. Swale And Banana Circle
3. Sydney Water “Love Your Garden” Review

Last week we had a truckload of mulch delivered from the Dunmore waste depot. It cost about $115 to have them deliver 9 cubic metres (12 cubic yards, or 4.6 tons), which I think is money well spent. Apparently you can go and fill your trailer with the stuff for free, but look at my trailer compared to the pile. I think it would have taken at least 10-15 trips to drag home that much mulch, and I would have had to do all the shovelling myself!

Can you see the steam rising out of the top of the pile? It’s partially composted, but still pretty hot.

And here’s a close-up to give you an idea of the structure and composition of the mulch. It’s made up of all the municipal green waste, shredded and partially composted. There’s a good mix of fine compost and larger chunks in it. There’s also more plastic and bits of painted wood than I’d like, but not enough to be a big concern. I can pick most of it out as I use the mulch.

So what am I going to do with all this mulch?

I’ve been digging some new garden beds, and in between them I’ve dug deep paths on contour. The paths are about a foot deep, and I dug that soil onto the beds to make them a little higher. In the bottom of the trenches I’m laying down cardboard (to smother any kikuyu grass that tries to grow back), and then filling them with this mulch.

Because the paths are on contour, they hold water when it rains and act like swales. The mulch soaks up the water and forms a reservoir, but because it’s loose and chunky the surface is still fine to walk on. The water will then be released to the surrounding garden beds slowly over the following week or two, reducing the need to water. As the plants in the beds get bigger, their roots will seek out the moisture in the paths and hopefully grow nice and deep and strong.

Normally you’d shy away from putting so much woody matter on garden beds for fear of locking up nitrogen in the soil. But the paths are between the beds, so the soil in the beds will not be affected. In addition, mycelium (fungi) will colonise the mulch paths. Plant roots and soil microorganisms work together with the mycelium to feed each other, for the benefit of the growing plants.

When the mulch in the paths eventually breaks down, it can be dug onto the garden beds as a rich humus dressing, and new mulch can be laid in the paths again.

Rob over at One Straw has a great explanation of the concept, which he calls pit and mound gardening.

It’s kind of like a mini swale/hugelkultur – garden paths don’t have to be unproductive!

I’ll post some photos soon. Hopefully I’ll get to do some more work on the garden beds over the weekend.

Related posts:

1. Jamberoo Community Growers – Don Cairns Talk
2. Rotary Hoe Advice?
3. Swale And Banana Circle

Jamberoo was cut off from every direction – Jamberoo Road, on both the Kiama side and the Albion Park side of the town, Swamp Road, and Jamberoo Pass as well. The preschool had to be evacuated, with the kids taken next-door to the (higher) fire station. The primary school was cut off as well, and we thought our kids might end up spending the night there!

This photo by Linda Faiers from the Illawarra Mercury website shows the flooding in the main street of Jamberoo:

Alan Baxter has also posted a great series of before and after shots on Flickr, showing the flooding around his property: first, second, third, fourth and fifth image. Some great shots there, that show just how quickly the water rose.

My neighbour Geoff posted some videos on YouTube of the flooding along our street, and our little bridge in the aftermath the next day. This first one shows the tiny creek that runs behind Geoff’s property:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYF8x7c3O3w

Here’s the road. There’s a bridge under there somewhere:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiVHEJvW-Pw

And finally here’s the bridge the next day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0QnR-9ieyw

Our property is fine – no damage, other than a wet floor in the garage where the water flowed through briefly. Fortunately there wasn’t anything sitting on the floor that could get affected, so no real problems. The swale and the dams are full to the brim now, as are all the water tanks.

Not something I’d like to see again for a long time!

Related posts:

1. Jamberoo Dairy Farmers on ABC’s Landline
2. Jamberoo Community Growers – A Successful Launch!
3. Jamberoo Community Growers Launch

Then we had the pigs in a pen above the ditch, and I really didn’t want to waste the nutrient that was flowing downhill every time it rained. Over time, I dug the swale deeper and wider, and brought it back closer to level so it would hold water for longer and hydrate the soil around it.

Of course, I finished digging it and took quite a while to do anything more. Sometimes life gets in the way!

In the photo below, you can see how much the weeds had started to take over. You can also seed the comfrey I planted along the bottom edge of the pig pen, both to catch nutrients and as a feed supplement (and compost supplement when we don’t have pigs).

I then had a brainwave and decided to dig a banana circle at the lower end of the swale, where the excess water flows out of it. It’s basically just a big round hole, with the swale feeding in water on one side and an overflow point on the other side. I dumped some chopped up palm trunks in the pit, which should absorb plenty of water and release it slowly to surrounding plants. I’ll keep piling compostable materials (leaves, garden waste, etc) into the pit to keep up the nutrient supply to the bananas.

The mulch is made up of long grass from around the fences and a native grass plant (pennisetum alopecuroides, I think?) that I’ve been trimming back recently. I spread all the trimmings across the ground in the chicken run, and let the chickens scratch it over for a couple of weeks. Hopefully they picked out all the seeds so I won’t get weeds sprouting. It dried out like hay, and had a lot of chicken manure added to it. Then I raked it all up and spread it on the swale.

After just a few days, the bananas are already looking a lot happier! It looks much neater, too.

I’ve got six banana plants growing now and am looking forward to a harvest, hopefully towards the end of this year or early next year. I’m very envious of Ally and Rich’s huge bunch of bananas!

Related posts:

1. Sydney Water “Love Your Garden” Review
2. Jamberoo Community Growers – Don Cairns Talk
3. Chop and Drop

This post is all about the fantastic chicken coop, dubbed the “chicken mansion”, that April showed us.

It’s a little hard to see inside the coop, but the floor is a raised metal grid with gaps of about 12mm (1/2 inch). It’s strong enough for a person to walk on, and allows manure, dust and broken down pieces of nesting material to fall through to the ground below. The mesh prevents rats from getting through, and the material that falls through simply rolls down the slope below the coop. On the left, you can just see the water barrel that collects rainwater from the roof gutters and provides drinking water for the chickens.

From the side, you can see how the whole coop is raised off the ground. Good use is made of the natural slope of the land, so you can walk in at ground level from the top side. The nesting box lids lift to allow easy access for egg collection from the outside, and the mesh side ensures good ventilation.

Looking at the chicken coop (on the left) from the rear, you can see the fox-proof ladder that allows the chickens access. The ladder is wide, and has wide spacing between rungs, so that foxes will not be able to climb it. By giving the chickens a ladder, you don’t need to lock them in each night and let them out each morning.

You can read more details about this chicken coop from the Permaculture Visions chicken mansion page.

What are the best chicken coop features you’ve seen? What would your “dream chicken coop” include?

Related posts:

1. Chicken Ark Plans
2. Free Permaculture Downloads
3. How Do You Make A Chicken Go Broody?

Today’s ideas are all to do with using water in the garden.

A half wine barrel makes an excellent raised pond for balconies or hard surface areas. In the photo above you can see that rainwater is captured and directed into the barrel. Plants are grown in pots submerged in the barrel and azolla, an aquatic plant, grows on the surface. A couple of goldfish can be released into the water to keep mosquitoes under control.

Dotted around the garden were various small ponds and water features. The ponds provide a source of drinking water for helpful animals like lizards and birds, and a home for frogs and beneficial insects. In return for the pond environment, these animals will provide you with free pest control.

Water in the garden also helps to moderate temperature swings through the day. It can reduce frost in the area around the pond, and also has a cooling effect during very hot weather.

The pond in the photo above is a larger one, made from ferrocement. A downpipe from the house roof delivers water into the pond, and the yard has been designed so that any overflow travels down towards the garden. If the overflow is significant, it will collect in the pit underneath the trampoline (pictured below). From there, it slowly soaks into the surrounding garden beds over the following weeks.

As you can see, there are lots of ways to incorporate water into your garden design. Doing so brings life and beauty into your yard, while also helping to reduce your workload in pest control and garden watering.

How have you used water in your garden?

Related posts:

1. Sydney Water “Love Your Garden” Review
2. Wicking Beds – Water Efficient Gardening
3. Baseline Water and Electricity Usage

As always, it turns out that Google has the answers!

Below is a graph of how the number of searches for the term “backyard chickens” has increased over recent years. Obviously the northern hemisphere is dominating the search patterns, as you can see the strong seasonal variation.

Interest in growing food in the backyard increased a little in 2008, but really took off in 2009 – perhaps due to the increased uncertainty brought on by the global economic crisis? This graph is for the term “growing vegetables“.

And it’s not just that people are spending more time at home and out in the yard – if that were the case then searches for “flower gardens“, “ornamental gardens“, etc would be increasing too. This graph is typical of the trends shown by these types of search terms, decreasing steadily year by year.

There’s also a strong interest in learning about “saving electricity” and “saving water“:

These graphs were all produced using Google Insights for Search. It’s a great way to explore what people are interested in and identifying broad trends. Be warned, though, you might end up spending hours playing around with it!

Related posts:

1. Backyard Chook Keeping Workshop – Wollongong
2. Backyard Revolution – 60 Minutes Story
3. Backyard Aquaponics In Gerringong

The first 10 minutes or so focuses on a Victorian dairy famer, and the problems he faces when water allocations are cut back in dry years.

Then the story moves on to Jamberoo dairy famers Michael and Lynne Strong, from Clover Hill Dairies. They talk about the warming climate trend, and some of the methods they use to maximise milk output when faced with the very high land prices around here ($70,000 per hectare or more!). They are now milking three times a day instead of two, which increases the milk output by 25% – meaning they can produce the same amount of milk on 25% less land than previously. They are also leasing grazing land instead of purchasing.

If you’re interested, it’s worth reading more about the Clover Hill Dairies environmental programs. They were awarded the 2009 Landcare Primary Producers Award, which is great vindication of the work they’re doing.

It’s interesting to hear that the long-term climate forecast for Jamberoo is to get both hotter and wetter. Maybe I won’t need to install that extra water tank I’ve been thinking of!

Related posts:

1. Keeping Cows In The City?
2. Jamberoo Community Growers Launch
3. Jamberoo FutureCare – My First Meeting

They’re calling the new rules the “Water Wise Rules” – because we’ve all learned from the drought and heavy restrictions, and are now much more water wise.

The new Water Wise Rules allow:

• Hand-held hoses, sprinklers and watering systems on any day before 10am and after 4pm. Hand-held hoses must be fitted with a trigger nozzle when watering.
• Children to play under the sprinkler on a hot day.
• Washing vehicles using a trigger nozzle.
• Fire hoses for fire-fighting only.
• No hosing of hard surfaces except for health and safety purposes or emergency and construction activities.
• Automatic exclusion for nurseries, market gardeners, landscapers, garden contractors, bowling greens, cricket wickets, golf tees and croquet, hockey, tennis and racing surfaces.

These are sensible rules. Hopefully the higher level of awareness everybody has for water issues will ensure we don’t run the dams down too quickly, and we don’t have to return to level 3 restrictions anytime soon.

Related posts:

1. Sydney Water Restrictions Madness
2. Sydney Water “Love Your Garden” Review
3. Wicking Beds – Water Efficient Gardening

While I’m in the mood for building stuff, I thought water-efficient wicking beds might be a great way to go. It’ll be an interesting winter project anyway!

A wicking garden bed uses a waterproof container or layer of plastic below the soil surface to form an underground reservoir of water. There is enough soil above the reservoir so that the plants don’t get “wet feet”. Plant roots then draw up this sub-surface water via capillary action.

Because they are watered from below, wicking beds lose very little water to evaporation. They are reportedly extremely water-efficient, and so are very well suited to low-rainfall areas. You can also leave them for a week or two without any watering, and your established plants will be fine. It’s only really seedlings that need additional watering from above.

Here are some links to information on wicking beds. Feel free to add more to the comments below!

• WaterRight Australia: Lots of really good info on wicking beds.
• Easy-Grow Vegetables: A spin-off site of WaterRight specifically about wicking bed technology.
• Scarecrow’s Garden: Documents one person’s experience and experiments with wicking worm beds in very dry inland Australia. There are several follow-up stories here documenting some great results.
• ALS Wicking Beds Forum Thread: Scarecrow (from the post above) answers lots of questions about wicking worm beds.
• Another ALS Thread: More info from Scarecrow.
• AusGarden Wicking Bed Forum Thread: Some more info and personal accounts.
• GardenGuides Photos: A good series of photos showing the construction of some wicking beds.
• CosmicConnection Forum Thread: Yet another forum thread, with some more good questions and answers by Scarecrow.
• Hills And Plains Seed Savers: Another post by Scarecrow, with some good photos and comparisons.
• Milkwood’s Wicking Bed: A great photo-essay on the construction of a simple round wicking bed – they make it look so easy!

Wicking boxes are an adaptation of the wicking bed design to container gardening. I’ve built some of these (photos soon!) and have been very happy with the results. Here are some links:

• Easy-Grow Boxes: A really good explanation of how to build wicking boxes from common materials like broccoli boxes, and getting worms to help you fertilise them.
• Scarecrow on Wicking Boxes: Again, using broccoli boxes.
• FoodNStuff: Another personal account, with follow-ups here and here.

Have you used wicking beds? How did they work for you? Let us know in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Sydney Water “Love Your Garden” Review
2. Sydney Water Restrictions Madness
3. Baseline Water and Electricity Usage

Check out all the sustainable retrofit rebates available here in Australia. Make sure you scroll to the bottom and find your state ones, too.

You could get a rainwater tank, a solar hot water system, solar electricity, roof insulation or a number of other items.

OK, maybe I’m a bit cheeky calling this stuff ‘free’. Some certainly is (like the free roof insulation), but some you will still have to pay something for after collecting the rebates. But with Rudd’s latest stimulus package just being passed, most Australians will be receiving enough cash to cover those remaining costs!

Or you could spend the money on some fruit trees, or on setting up a vegetable garden, or even just use it to fund a switch to green energy for a decade or so.

None of us were budgeting for these handouts a fortnight ago, so why not spend it on something to reduce the running costs of your home, enhance its resale value, increase your quality of life, and reduce your environmental footprint? Surely that’s a great way to spend a bunch of money that just fell into our collective laps?!

How are you going to spend your Rudd bonus? Share your ideas in the comments!

Photo by Ed Bacchus.

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1. Know Your Government Rebates!
2. Cheap Grid-Connected Solar Power: $2500 for 1 kW System
3. Swap Lightbulbs For CFLs For Free

Kids can run under sprinklers any time of the day, you can hose windows and walls any time, and you can wash your car at any time. You can also leave your hose running unattended to top up pools or fill containers, and you can even fill pools under 10,000 litres without a permit.

But try to hose your tomatoes any day other than the dictated Sundays and Wednesdays, and then only before 10 or after 4, and you’ll be fined $220.

According to information I was recently sent from Permaculture Principles, home-grown vegies use 1/5th of the water required to grow the same amount of food industrially.

There has been a bit of a push by The Diggers Club, in the pages of Gardening Australia Magazine, and many others to try to get a fairer deal for home vegie gardeners.

I’ve read some evidence that water restrictions actually increase the amount of water many people use on their gardens. Knowing they can’t water for another 3 or 4 days, people will give their gardens a really good soaking on the designated days even if they don’t need it. You can’t take a punt on whether it’ll rain or not overnight – you have to water, or risk your garden drying out before the next watering day.

Fear not, though, I have a solution!

Put a sprinkler in the vegie patch and get the kids to run through it. That seems to be an acceptable use of water. Your kids may even be able to earn extra pocket money running through sprinklers for your childless neighbours!

Related posts:

1. Sydney Water “Love Your Garden” Review
2. Baseline Water and Electricity Usage
3. Solar Hot Water Information Night – Gerringong

I’ve tried to collect all the information I could find on Australian federal rebate programs, as well as all the different rebate schemes for the various states. There are a lot of good opportunities in there if you’re thinking of retrofitting some sustainable modifications to your house, so check them out and make sure you claim back what you’re entitled to!

The state-specific pages are: NSW, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, with NT and ACT to come when I finish the research.

If you know of any rebates that I’ve missed in all this, please leave a comment below and I’ll update the pages.

Related posts:

1. Cheap Grid-Connected Solar Power: $2500 for 1 kW System
2. Solar Power On It’s Way!
3. Gross Solar Feed In Tariff Petition For Australia

For the past quarter, on average we used about 40 kWh/day of electricity and about 850 L/day of water. The electricity is split between about 25 kWh/day of normal usage and 15 kWh/day of off-peak (i.e. hot water). Where the hell does all that go?!

We’re a family of five, with three young children, so I guess you’d expect us to use a lot of water and electricity cleaning clothes, bathing kids, leaving lights on, running computers and TVs, keeping a spare fridge running, etc. But still, those figures were a lot higher than I’d expected.

I’m going to start breaking the numbers down more and trying to find out what we can do to reduce them. At least we’re starting from a very high baseline, so there must be a lot of low-hanging fruit!

Related posts:

1. Sydney Water “Love Your Garden” Review

Our horticulturalist (let’s call her Linda) arrived bang on time. She was very friendly and knowledgeable, and understood right away where we were coming from. I explained about Sustainable Illawarra and what we were trying to achieve. Actually, she was really impressed with Kiama Council when I told her about the compost workshop last weekend, the free compost bin for participants, the subsidised bokashi buckets we can get, etc.

First, we walked around our property and I explained what we were doing or planned to do in each area. Mostly it involved planting food plants everywhere. Linda had some good suggestions for different plants to consider in different areas, and advised that we generally plant the smaller plants and shrubs towards the front of our front yard (north), and use larger shrubs and trees going further uphill and towards the back (south). This maximises the sun each plant receives, and makes sure the larger plants don’t shade smaller plants behind them.

Linda had a really good understanding of organic gardening and permaculture, and gave me lots of little tips on various plants as we walked around (the clivias are getting too much sun, throw banana skins into the bird’s nest ferns, the beans would benefit from some fish emulsion on their leaves, etc). She also showed me a few different bugs in the vegie patch – good ones and bad ones.

Next Linda did a “dog poo” test of our soil in various places. This involved squeezing a handful of soil into a ball, and trying to roll it into a sausage (or dog poo).

Our natural soil, which is mostly in the front yard and down the side of the house, held together in a sausage, and is mostly clay. Linda called it a loamy clay, being mostly clay with some organic matter. She advised that we try to get more organic matter into the soil, to turn it into a clay loam. The best way to lighten it is to dig in compost and cow manure when preparing new beds, and keep a good mulch of sugar cane or lucerne in all the beds. Besides retaining moisture in the soil, worms will feed on the mulch as it breaks down and move it deeper into the ground, breaking up the clay and spreading the organic matter throughout.

Looking at the digging I’ve been doing in the front yard preparing for a retaining wall, we could see very obviously where the topsoil ended and the clay subsoil began. Linda said to make sure when we do the earthmoving to level the yard that the bobcat driver scrapes all the topsoil off to the side, then does the earthmoving, and then spreads the topsoil back on top. If we don’t do that, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting lawn and gardens to grow.

The soil in our raised beds was bought from landscape suppliers. I knew at the time it wasn’t the best soil in the world, but Linda confirmed that. When rolled into a sausage, it breaks up and doesn’t hold together. It also feels quite gritty between your fingers. She called it a loamy sand. Again, organic matter will improve it. Again, dig in compost and cow manure, and mulch heavily. We’ve been doing that, but it will take time to improve the soil and turn it into a sandy loam. The biggest problem with the vegie soil right now is that it drains fairly quickly and doesn’t hold moisture – more organic matter will help a lot with that. The good news was that there were already lots of worms in the soil working away, so all we really need to do is keep feeding them and things will improve over time. She also recommended we use the chickens’ bedding sawdust (full of lovely chook poo) directly spread around the vegie patch each time we change it.

Linda was intrigued by our “square foot gardening” vegie patch. She’d never seen anything like it before, but seemed to think it was interesting when I explained it to her. I’ll write another post on that soon. She also hadn’t seen wicking boxes before, and was surprised that the tomatoes we have in them are doing so well. They’re very water-efficient, and I’ll write about them soon too.

I was also able to pick Linda’s brain about greywater. We can get a hose and start using the laundry rinsewater right now, using it to water the side garden. Using the shower/bath water from the main bathroom would be a bit more work, but our plans for citrus and other fruit trees would work well with the greywater. We’d need to plumb into the bathtub drain, and mount a surge tank under the bathroom that feeds a leaky hose running under the mulch around the fruit trees.

Rainwater tanks are something else we’re interested in. Linda agreed that the large under-house bladder tanks we’ve been looking at would be a pretty good solution, given our lack of space around the house. It would probably only pick up about half the roof area, though, so she recommended we consider slimline tanks down either side of the house to pick up the remaining down pipes. They could be gravity drained to water the front yard, removing the cost and hassle of pumps.

Before leaving, Linda gave me some tap tags (see images below, click for larger view). The idea is to cable-tie these to your taps, and they advise you on how much water your various garden beds need. She also gave me a rain gauge, so we can measure whether we’ve had enough rain and can skip a water. Obviously running a hose for a measured period of time only works if you know the flow rate of that tap, so she also gave me 15 L/min flow restrictors for each of the four garden taps. She also left me some brochures and information sheets on greywater use, rainwater tanks, and recommended plants for different types of gardens. A written report will be coming in the mail in a few weeks today.

At the end of the day, the Love Your Garden service was well worth the money. An hour and a half with a qualified horticulturalist in your own garden for $33 is very good value. Just the tap flow restrictors and rain gauge are probably worth that! Although there weren’t any real eye-openers from the session, I got lots of little tidbits of great advice and ideas from Linda, and it was reassuring to know we’re heading down the right track.

No related posts.

In the spirit of this Challenge, I’m planning to take advantage of as many of these sorts of opportunities as I can.

The first will be the Kiama Council Composting Workshop on Saturday. We’ve been composting all our organic waste for years, but it’s still an opportunity to learn something and meet some like-minded people. Oh, and you get a free compost bin for attending .

I’ve also booked Sydney Water for a Love Your Garden appointment. For $33 a qualified horticulturalist comes out and inspects your garden, then writes up a report on the watering needs of your garden and recommendations on how you can save water. You also get a few gadgets like a rain gauge and Tap Tags, plus some vouchers to save money on other water saving products. I’ll write up a review of that service after the visit.

No related posts.