Water

Water is as fundamental as air in our livelihood. Living in populated areas, you take for granted that every time you turn the faucet fresh water will come out. When we were searching for homes, having a source of water not dependent on the grid was one of the things we looked for.

When we found this place, we had never used a cistern based water system, though we knew what it was.
For those of you who don't know a cistern is simply a large underground (in our case) tank that holds water until it's ready to use.

Typical rainwater harvesting setup, and very much like ours.

 The water is held there, and transferred into the house via a pump and hoses.
The water is replenished via runoff from the roof during rain or by the truckload during a drought. We try very hard not to use option B.

Cistern

It's just a big box in the ground. With a lid. And a hole for hoses. And a thing we don't know what is...

Right now, it's a great place to store pallets we're saving. 

At the left there you'll see a bucket upside down with a rock on it. That's to keep the most awesome doggo ever from peeing in the cistern every time he goes out.

Mayhem - aka Most Awesome Doggo Ever

Seriously, his only flaw. 

The "Pee Shield". 

All of those hoses! They're all doing a job, and a very important one. These hoses transfer water from the collection barrels to the cistern. 

Back porch - carries out the majority of the house roof collection.

Garage collectors - adding these increased our collection by at least 1,000 gallons per rain storm! 

Close up of the roof to barrel system. 

Front half of the roof collector.

Another front collector.

All of those hoses run from these barrels to the cistern. There the water is held until we need it. We do not drink the water, as it is not currently potable. It is used for showers, toilets, laundry, and dishes. 

We hope to add a small pond for overflow collection as well as gray-water reclamation at some point. 

Well, there you have it - hope you've enjoyed this tour of the water system. 

See you soon! 

~E 

A Big Fat Update

Yeah, I know. It's been awhile. A couple of years in fact since I've updated.
A LOT has happened. I suppose a run down of all of that would be in order.
So here goes, in no particular order:

1. We welcomed a third grandson to the family in September of 2016, he is precious and precocious and we're quite fond of him.
2. All of the grand kids and their mom moved out a year ago this month to live in Georgia. We will have them for 7 weeks this summer, and I'm pretty excited about that.
3. We lost our ewe "Patches" to a dog attack, and it was quite sad.
4. Our first ram "Pappy" (pictured in the previous post with Patches) went to market as he got to be a bit unmanageable, as rams tend to do.
5. We have had the following sheep since that time:

• Jasper
• Oreo
• Tango
• Cash
• Luna
• Two unnamed market lambs

6. We currently have two little rams that will go to market in August - Frank and Jesse.

7. We lost our pickup truck in October, which was our only mode of transportation, thankfully my parents had a vehicle they weren't driving that they gave us. We're now the proud owners of an Aztek - featured in the hit show Breaking Bad. LOL

8. We are no longer raising rabbits. We still have 2 retired bucks that will stay here for the duration, but no more girls, no more babies. Thankfully - they're a pain! 

9. We stopped plowing the ground and have moved to square foot boxes for our garden, and so far I'm really pleased. 

10. We lost the greenhouse in March of '17 to a microburst that also ripped the neighbors roof off her house. In the grand scheme of things, we were fortunate. It took just over a year to get her home back to normal! 

11. Things stopped getting updated because our only computer died! We have a new (to us) one now, so we're back! 

Well,. I guess that's about it for this update. There will be more to come. We have a YouTube channel now - I'll add the link below.
Star Dollar YouTube

Thanks for reading! 

-E