Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Still thinking about water here.

The water company issued a memo with our bill a few months back-- only use out door water on ODD days if your address is odd, EVEN if your address is even. 
No washing your vehicle except at a place of business CAR WASH. 
No watering the lawn. 
and to businesses (I found this one extreme) Only give patrons water UPON REQUEST
Right now the only outdoor watering that I do on our ODD days is fill the bird bath and put water out for dogs. My daughter and son inlaw usually tend the dogs, but every other day I fill an extra water source for them. 


I also have a few tomato plants that get water - but for those I use dish water. 


We live very near (about 10 miles)  a water reservoir/ lake...it supplies water to many different areas including Ft.Worth-- (although we are not anywhere near Ft.Worth)
This is the latest report from about 6 days ago on our lake -- 

August 17, 2011

Lake Levels

Lake Level..............316.62*

Lake Temp. (top)...........91

Lake Temp. (bottom).....86

* Normal lake level is 322.00 feet above Mean Sea Level.
Below is a video I recently watched about water and how to drill for it. I found it to be quite   informative
I currently am trying to convince Honey the need to gather the supplies need to drill a well.(i'm trying to do this with gentle nudging, and not nagging) ;)  
I think I mentioned before that we have an old well on our property. 
I'm currently  looking into ways to determine that wells  viability




A another thing I'm also considering- water collection. After watching a video by Marjory Wildcraft  
I recently came to understand that every roof top is a collection system/ run-off. 
By every roof, I mean; 
Porches, 
Houses, 
Barns, 
Sheds, 
and 
Chicken Coops and Animal pens. 
You just need to have the guttering set up to run into a barrel;it helps to have the proper coverings in order to deter mosquitoes from laying their eggs there and also to keep out unwanted debris. 
This water can then be used to water gardens and feed animals and live stock. If filtered properly-- I suppose you could drink it and even bath in it if you needed to. ;) 


This is just one of the things I've been looking into lately. I thought I'd share it here. 


I'm also putting together a list of things to plant for the fall-- I hope to get those in the ground soon. It would be nice to have some veggies growing and producing when the weather starts to turn cool! 


Homesteading is going to take some hard work. I've done lots and lots of reading about it over the years-- but never have gotten to work on it as much as we have this year. I think I recently read it takes about 10 years to gain the knowledge to do it and do it well. 
I hope to take what I've learned in the past and apply it. Some of these things I was doing a little of but left it to the way side-- and am now ready to pick up these skills and begin again.  This is me-- making an effort! 
That's all we can do, right? 


In all labor there is profit, But mere talk leads only to poverty~ Proverbs 14:23 


God Bless you and Thanks for reading. 

3 comments:

Granny said...

When we lived in the mountains of Arizona we had rain barrels at each downspout. We used the water for plants and to water the animals. No one in the area had a well and everyone hauled their water from the nearby town. When we took showers we had a large rubbermaid tub that we set inside our bathtub. We used the water collcted in the rubbermaid tub for flushing the toilet.

gail@My Repurposed Life said...

Every little bit helps! We are such a wasteful nation.
I think it's wonderful how you are trying to make a small difference in your corner of the world. We need more "pats"!!!
I hope ya'll get some much needed rain very soon!
gail

Loraine said...

This drought is the worst. We are forbidden to water our lawn at all unless from 9pm up to midnight and that odd and even mumbo jumboand you can't use a sprinkler at all. My grass is so dead that my kids are having a blast walking through the yard just to hear it crunch. I bought rain barrels this summer for watering my garden, they aren't very handy if it NEVER rains. I hope we all get some much needed rain.