garden grow

I sure hope it does.














Behold, my super duper greywater management solution. The long straight pipe waters some plantains, whilst the pipe with the bend in it waters what will be a vegetable bed.

I was quite appalled to find, when I arrived here, that my shower and my sink both drained out into the yard. Hello sir, we're in a desert. And it's the hot dry season right now.

On top of that, the sink and bath drained out of two different pipes. However, I've finally managed to reroute the water for good use. The kitchen drains to a much trickier location, so for the moment I'm just washing all my plates into a bucket in order to use the water, until I find a better solution.

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Constructing this system was a lot more trouble than I initially envisioned. The connections leaked. The end of the sink-drain was a sharp right angle and it was really hard to get a good fit/seal with the transfer pipe.

To make things ten times worse, PVC is notoriously hard to "reduce" (neck down to a smaller diameter) so I opted to build the entire system out of one-and-quarter inch size pipe (which is what the house pipes are) rather than a much easier quarter inch, for example.

The biggest problem it created was for the vegetable watering setup. Since the final delivery pipe is so large, it will never flood completely-- which would make it conveniently drip from every hole at the same rate

I had to carefully cut, and re-cut, and prop it at a good slope, and bend the pipe by hand into a straight-but-slightly-curved shape, and carefully adjust the alignment of the holes to get an even drip along the whole length.














After many hours of work (including moving rocks, composting, digging, and hitting and repairing a water supply line to my bathroom --I have no idea what it was doing in the middle of the yard), My system is finally complete. I still have to move some more rocks and dirt to fill up the area around the long pipe to reduce the tripping hazard.

Still, I'm quite proud of the work thus far. The second-biggest plantain is really happy (the biggest one is dead). It sprouts a new leaf every week.

I've sown beet seeds! I really hope they sprout soon. No chickens yet.