Our suburban food forests : water, everywhere, with style

Thursday, May 2, 2013

water, everywhere, with style

We underprovide for water outside. I have now five slim tall water tanks for roof collection, for which I am gradually improving reticulation systems. I have been absent minded for a long time and too often, over the last several years, I have left a hose from a tank running and emptied the tanks. Fortunately we get good rain here, and I have town water too.

Sticking with the principle that if it's worth doing it has to be done with some aesthetic sense, here is fun created with the assistance of my friend and helper Trevor in front and back in provision of water for washing hands and garden products.

In the front garden, a French made Porcelaine de Paris hand basin with gilt taps, soap and nail brush dishes. I have yet to decide whether to install solar powered pump so the lion can whistle water into the basin. And while washing up, listen to the Black Ants as they play bluegrass (almost the only grass left, certainly the only grass not under threat). No, it's not superman or a bird, it's a plane in a cage, enwreathed in solar powered LED stars at night.

In the back garden, under a tamarillo, a proper back garden washup situation, modelled graciously by Trevor, with two kitchen sinks, two shower heads... which are also very good for sticking your head under on very hot days.

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Looking forward to your thoughts, write as much as you wish, ask questions. Comments do not appear until moderated. I will try to do that quickly. Thanks for looking and thinking!!

Dennis Argall, the writer here, is a retired ambassador etc who has also been custodian of a small certified organic orchard and who obtained a Permaculture Designer's Certificate in 1993. Now applying skills and happy hopes to discover just how much life can be loaded into a town block.

Dennis's partner Helen Backhouse is a social policy activist and regional manager for a non-clinical mental health services organisation who has a long term passion for planning and growing a garden and getting dirty in it... and whose garden displays art as well as plant life.

Having two gardens means we can enthusiastically support each other's vision and efforts rather than squabble over one. :-)

Dennis began writing the blog in his garden, but Helen's has often been much more interesting!

some guiding thoughts...

These three quotes from an old site of mine:

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops,
but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.
Masanobu Fukuoka

The richness of our lives depends on our surroundings and what we fill them with.
Jackie French

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology,
but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long-known, but latterly often forgotten.
Aldo Leopold

And borrowing from Todd's Big Blog of Gardening:

"Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed.

Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is.

We lose our health — and create profitable diseases and dependencies — by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak.

This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause problems.

The ‘drudgery’ of growing one’s own food, then, is not drudgery at all. (If we make the growing of food a drudgery, which is what ‘agribusiness’ does make of it, then we also make a drudgery of eating and living.) It is — in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need — a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the Creation, the conviviality of one body with all bodies.”

Wendell Berry