Appreciating the Fruits of My Efforts and Giving The Finger To Utility Companies.

 While it's been another week for working on infrastructure as the dry weather persists, the small-wins come through daily with fresh tomatoes, celery, capsicums and salad greens in particular drip-feeding through daily. I have mixed feelings about this as I would prefer it all to arrive on an defined schedule, but then there is something highly satisfying about picking what I need when it is ready.  

Weather-proofing the house has continued, with the damaged lintel above the front stairs now painted again, leaving the front and back stairs as the next priorities for action. Both of these involve repairs I don't know how to do - so it will be .... interesting.  

In particular, I'm come to appreciate having my own rainwater collection system and solar system. 

This summer has been dry with intermittent rainfall, yet I've kept gardens going off my tanks so far. It's gotten close with multiple last-minute saves, so another month of capacity seems my optimum balance between rainwater and falling back on mains supply. Conversely, extended good weather benefits my power bill, though this reduces as the days shorten and the suns angle declines. 

With the experience of providing this parallel infrastructure, I appreciate how much value we from these suppliers - but it's not like we get anything more for the increased prices. Price rises are an annual tradition now, and while I'm not completely independent (yet!), I appreciate being able to limit their impacts to a significant degree. 

And so onto the main 'win' for the week...

“Last Week On Auckland Urban Homestead…

I've changed the irrigation to  

• Relocate the visible blue barrel on the front lawn 
• Connect another planter and 
• Confirm it's worth connecting the rest of the planters due to the savings in effort and attention involved. (Though some questions exist about the best way.)

I'd previously installed a blue barrel as a source of water/liquid feed for a standalone planter choosing this over digging an irrigation line in. 

   

One downside was that the barrel looked ugly, so this week I relocated it to above the backyard planters..

and connected this to the standalone planters, giving a final look I prefer:

(The irrigation hose is concealed by the angle and the longer grass, but it's an effective mockup of the desired result ). 

A quick test showed everything was working well with a flow rate of about 4 litres per minute from an single tap which was the same as before, so gravity didn't make a difference in this case.

Adding Another Planter To The Barrel Irrigation.

The above went a lot faster than expected, so I added one of backyard planters:  

This needs the barrel to run for about 4 – 5 minutes to supply approximately 1 litre of water per plant for 18 plants.

Relevant considerations are that

• Everything is on a minor slope, with gravity contributing to a flow rate of 4 litres per minute.
• Only three planters are supplied, each with their own taps connected to the common ‘main’.
• I tested supply by running each planter consecutively, and didn’t try running them together.
• The liquid feed is home-made mix of compost tea, commercial powdered seaweed and harvested rainwater.

Improvements to the Recurring Work

Saturdays' feeding across my four 'gardens' took about 90 minutes - the majority of this being making up and applying the liquid feed amongst weeding, harvesting. 

To compare apples with apples, my ‘review’ is for the now three connected planters. To briefly recap, the liquid feed is manually diluted/mixed at the central compost tea point, and then carried to the relevant planter(s).  The net improvement was in how much easier it was to simply load the barrel and turn on the taps, compared to the laboriousness involved in individually mixing and feeding the manually-fed planters. 

The trade-off was the effort involved to ‘charge’ the barrel with 200 litres of liquid feed/water mix. This was done clumsily due to a lack of practice (e.g. forgetting where I put a relevant hose attachment.) However, experience will optimise this :)

Conclusions & Lessons

Overall, I’m satisfied this is worth doing on a larger scale and burying the irrigation hose to the standalone planter - the latter isn’t a big job, just disproportionately difficult in rock-hard clay . The payback will be to reduce the effort and attention needed in the future.

Below are some additional points that need to be worked through.

• There was a lot of work in mixing/moving the compost tea from a central point, so that could be made more efficient.
• The compost tea has to be fine enough to flow through the hoses without clogging. Larger solids like seeds etc are a risk - I need an adequate pre-filter that works in a bulk ue situation..
• The effort and time could be minimised if I irrigate all planters consecutively. This depends upon the current flow rate, which is determined by some mixture of the barrels water pressure and the width of the irrigation hose. I ‘should’ probably experiment with running all the connected planters concurrently, and see what this does for feeding each planter equally well. Would replacing 13 mil hose with e.g. 19 mil be worth it?

That's this weeks main effort complete. Next steps? - that I need to think about.