Grey Water Vege Garden

One of the problems I have with growing veges or any plants for that matter is that I’m hopeless when it comes to watering them.  I have the best intentions but I’ll get sidetracked and forget to water them.  I did okay in the tunnel house last year, shame we had other issues there.  My house plants are often fading and limp before I notice and give them some more water, although it’s not often I actually kill them.

My grey water vege garden.  A work in progress.

This is never going to work if we really want to be self-sufficient and grow all of our own food.  I had to think of other ways to cover my negligence in the water area.  “Meaning to do it better” has been my thing for about 10 years and hasn’t worked yet, we needed a backup plan.

We found a pipe that runs from the rainwater downpipes, under the driveway and over to a slight slope in the paddock next to the house that faces northeast.  Perfect spot for a garden!  The start of the pipe, well at least one of them, is next to the drains from our ensuite.  Running into this drain is the washing machine, our shower, bath and basin.  It was really quite easy to disconnect this drain from the sewer lines and hook it up to the pipe with the rain water still going there as well.

So I started to build a grey water garden.  I started with an old concrete laundry tub I’d found in a paddock.  It had holes drilled into the bottom, so I figure it had been used for a planter at some time already.  I lined the hole I made under the tub with polythene and sat the tub on bricks with stones.  I also ran a piece of pipe I found lying around from the plughole down the hill a little (after drilling holes in the pipe).

A bathtub potato planter.

We had found a roll of stuff - the weave seems too big for weedmat but too small for windbreak - not sure what it’s supposed to be - I put two layers on the bottom, covered them with small stones then two more layers of this weedmat windbreak stuff.  One bag of potting mix and I was ready to plant.  I put a cherry tomato plant and several bulbs of garlic in this planter. 

Below, running down the hill I ran more polythene, a layer of stones and this time the soil was mostly our local clay.  The pipe from the tub runs down the middle and I planted onions around it.  I bought a pot of Egyptian walking onions - apparently the “flowers” are small bulbs that when they get big enough will cause the stem to bend down and root where they land.  The onions are perfectly edible  too.  But I’ve also got the normal brown onions as well.

My hubby wanted to use one of the bathtubs lying around for growing spuds, so I followed the same process with weedmat/windbreak stuff and stones.  I put in some of the soil I’d dug up to fit the tub and planted about 5 seed spuds.  My next problem though was how to get water from the pipe to the bathtub.

A bathtub full of spuds with celery, broccoli and silver beet behind it.

When we’d been changing our drain over to this line, we discovered that the drain outside the sleepout didn’t have anything running into it.  Maybe a previous owner had planned to put a kitchen sink in there at some stage (which makes sense given that there is a kitchen cupboard unit inside at the same spot) but we had no such plans.  Hubby disconnected the pipe running to this drain and capped the sewer line it was attached to.  I now had a gully trap and about 5 metres of pipe.

A little rearranging of my concrete tub and we fitted the gully trap behind it and Master Fourteen dug a trench for the pipe.  I dug down the soil on the slope below the pipe and lined it with polythene.  A 2 inch layer of soil and I planted some celery, broccoli and silver beet.  The idea is that the excess water will run down to the bathtub.

A bathtub planter with carrots, radishes and parsnips.

Hubby was buying some bioblend for the tunnel house so I appropriated enough to fill another bathtub and sowed seed for carrots, parsnips and radishes.  This mix is one my Dad taught me many years ago.  They take different amounts of time to come ready so the theory is that they’ll be self-thinning.  I also used some to top up the soil for the celery etc and by this time the spuds were growing quite nicely so I added more soil to that bathtub too.

After that I was given 14 pumpkin plants, so I hauled tyres from around the place and filled them with more bioblend and planted them out.  I haven’t sorted their water yet, we have some plans involving another length of pipe, irrigation hose connectors and some of the irrigation bits I’ve found around the place, but for now, I’m filling buckets to water them.  I also have 3 spare tyres (because I miscounted the number of plants) so I’m waiting for my cucumbers that I started from seed and are currently on the windowsill in the kitchen to get big enough for transplanting.

14 pumpkin plants growing in tyres.

The bonus for me is that all we’ve bought for this is some bioblend (at about $30 for a trailer load) and a few plants.  Most I’ve started from seed, but the odd one has been a cheap tray of vege plants from the garden centre.  It all seems to be growing well, despite having been dug up by a puppy, crapped in by cats and scratched over by chooks.  All the bits were stuff that we had lying around here.  Stuff that was left behind or left over from other ventures. 

The bioblend is supposed to be a gap-filler.  I’ve started to set up what I hope will be a worm farm.  An article on this in the Lifestyle Block magazine inspired me to use half the tunnel house for worm-farming.  I’m currently shifting mountains of pig, chook and cow poo into it.

This is what self-sufficiency is supposed to be about.