Grey water

My great grandmother grew some of the best roses in the land. Well, some of the best roses in all of the Trimleys that is. When roving bands of aphids plagued other gardeners’ prized flowers, hers remained unharmed. This is one of the stories that are told in our family. You know the type of story; the stories that get told whenever the older family members get together with the younger, usually at holiday meals.

My great grandmother you see, use to do the washing up in a bucket and then pored the old dish water over the rose bushes outside the kitchen window. The first few times I heard this story, I was amazed. I was very young then you see, and being the Eighties, dish soap when applied to any plant was the quickest way to kill the poor rosebush. My great grandmother used castile soap, mostly because it was the only soap available at the time; unlike our modern household which was use to using products like Sunlight. Castile soap is made with oil or fat and an alkaline like lye which worked not only as an insect repellent but also nourished the plants.

This was the first time I realized that you could garden without chemicals (which did nothing to stop the aphids anyway and always seemed to be to me a waste of money). I think that this was the most powerful realization I had in my youth and I began, at a rather young age, to question all the ‘facts’ imparted to me by garden centers and by television. I also began to experiment and thus learned that modern dish soap leads to dead plants.

I’m quite lucky that I became sensitive to chemicals at this time in history and not ten or twenty years ago. Now products made according to old recipes (like castile soap) are readily available. All the cleaning products in the house nowadays are plant friendly and biodegrade quickly, even the dish soap. I always think it such a shame when I come in from watering my plants (with well water) to have a bath. Why can’t all that lovely nourishing bath water go to plants? Why send it to the septic field (which is bound to overflow with four people livening in the house)?

The plan is to install a grey water system. Grey water is water not suitable for drinking but is still good for other things (like watering plants). For example: bath water, laundry water, and dish water (provided you use natural soaps). The brown water, like that from the toilet, will still go to the septic field for now – we don’t have the resources or the energy to process this safely at the moment. Maybe in a few years when the septic field needs replacing we could switch to a system that would allow us to use this waste product in a more resourceful way.

The grey water system consists of a tank which will be buried at the base of the house. A hose will go from it to the lower garden and the water from the tank will flow according to the will of gravity to the stand pipe at the lower garden. At the top of the tank, there will be an overflow outlet which will flow into a series of small pools filled with reeds for filtration and finally join the pond (which has yet to be dug).

The council tells us that it is easy to get a permit for this as it doesn’t touch drinking water. They say all we need is a rough sketch of our plans and ten dollars. That is what they say in any rate.

The water tank arrived today, courtesy of our neighbour who hates the smell of an overflowing septic field in the summer. It’s about the size of my bedroom, so I think it will do.

On a side note, I don’t know if this would have happened so early on in our life here at the farm if I hadn’t taken it upon myself to show just how much water we make use of doing a simple thing such of laundry. My laundry machine is about a quarter size of a regular washing machine and is suppose to be extremely economical on water as well as electricity. For example it only fills with water two or three (your choice) times during a wash as opposed to up to five times for a regular washer. I did a wash on the economical setting and instead of allowing the water to flow down the drain; I lined up some 10 gallon buckets. One large load of wash filled up five buckets. Can you imagine? I thought for certain it couldn’t be right. Maybe the buckets are really five gallons instead? But no. All that water that could be used for the plants get’s dumped down the drain on an ordinary washing day. I cringe to think of how inefficient the washing machine that the other people in this house use might be. Just think, we are using water from the tap to water the plants. This way of doing things is not sustainable at all. So the grey water system is getting installed sooner rather than at the end of the year. It should make quite a difference.