1stop Organic Gardening

OK, so what are these problems that I’m talking about with my new organic garden? The first and main problem is that we don’t have mains water. We’re relying on rain water alone.

This is our first growing season on the farm and we haven’t got any water system in place yet. The farm has been abandoned for probably 30 or 40 years, but they must have survived with the water system they had. There are two main unground water storage tanks, one that uses a large shed for water collection and the other uses the house. Both tanks hold about 45,000 litres (about 10,000 gallons) each.

We cleaned out and re-roofed the shed tank and it has been collecting rain water for part of the winter. We didn’t finish cleaning out the other tank before the winter rains, so it’s filled up with fairly yucky water now, which we’ll have to pump out, clean out and re-roof this summer.

So we have some water in this tank, but haven’t got a system to get it out of the tank and onto the garden…yet! Of course having no mains power adds an element of difficulty. But hubby has added a connection to my car battery which allows me to run an inverter (240Volts) so that I can plug in a pump or whatever other appliance we need.

By next winter we’ll have the other underground tank restored and by the next growing season I’ll have irrigation set up for all my veggie plots. Plus we’ll probably have 3 or 4 above ground tanks that will collect rain water from other out-buildings on the property.

I’m really sad that I won’t have much growing for some time….  I just love having my hands in the soil, but it’s really disheartening to see your much loved plants start to grow and then get wiped out by a few days of extremely hot weather. So I’ve made the hard decision to not grow veggies this summer. (sniff!!!)

But I will still be posting with tips and chatting about how the farm’s going. Next post I’ll talk about some other issues with my new “garden”.

Happy Organic Gardening, Healthy Living…

Filed under: Uncategorized on November 18th, 2009