Water of Life
It has rained this morning, the first moisture to fall from the sky this month. Sadly, it was only a fine mist that made faint pattering noises and raised a sweet smell, but it wasn't enough to let me check if my quick repair to the broken gutter was going to work, and it didn't put anything into my arrangement of water-butts.
The new green one was bought from a garden centre recently to satisfy little petal's urge to buy new things. She won't even re-use last year's earth in the pots, every spring she wants to see sacks of brand new compost ready for use. Sadly, having positioned the water butt so that the ground-level tap was high enough to get a watering can underneath, she complained that it was too painful having to keep bending down. I was waiting for just such an opportunity, and placed the tatty old black plastic water tank alongside the butt so that the overflow from the one would fill the other.
I love finding new uses for old items. If I were a Womble, I would be Uncle Buggeritaboutabit.
A short distance along from the water butts is another 'old' item.
Actually, it isn't old by my definition, it is a solar-powered water feature that little petal bought five years ago, and used for a few months. After that, it fell into the category of 'old', meaning that she hadn't bought it that spring. I stopped her from throwing it away and had a joyful fiddle. The pump, I found, still worked, but the nicad battery connections were rusty, and the solar panel had corroded from the inside. I cobbled together an old car battery, a voltage reducer, and one of my small solar panels, and it ran happily all through the party.
Moving stealthy on, but still staying on the garden theme, here is the potato patch, and the first signs that I might be causing her to rethink her 'it-must-be-new' strategy. Although the two plastic bags are brand new, the stacks of tires alongside them aren't. She even suggest we use them without any prompting.
This is the onion field (in honour of the Jazz Butcher's song), which was an old plastic box I rescued, and then used a soldering iron to weld up the gaping crack in one side which probably was responsible for it being thrown in the skip first of all. In front of them are spring onions in an old plastic crate that was foolish enough to stay still for long enough for soil to fall in it. She was going to throw it away. I think this craze for recycling things hgas gone far enough, it's time to look at repair, re-use, or even rejuvenate. (Thanks for that one, Pea, I'll plant some in your honour :)
And this old glass-fibre water tank is now the carrot plantation. Vegetables, I have been told, are mostly water, and so are permanently thirsty. Walk into any bar, in any town, and you'll find similar allotments all swaying gently in the breeze waiting for their next sprinkling to quench their thirsts.
By now you should all be realising why I am praying for rain, and collecting it when it falls. Our tap water, for which we pay the second-highest water rates in the country, is limescale-saturated stuff that stinks of chlorine. We have to pass it through a filter before using it to drink, or make tea and coffee, and when we did use it to water some of the house plants their leaves turned brown and died. A recent piece of advice for saving the planet was to use rain water for flushing the loo. Well, in our house, that's about all the tap water's fit for. I want to collect the rainwater, put it through a small reed-bed, and use it for washing. More on that in a future post.
The new green one was bought from a garden centre recently to satisfy little petal's urge to buy new things. She won't even re-use last year's earth in the pots, every spring she wants to see sacks of brand new compost ready for use. Sadly, having positioned the water butt so that the ground-level tap was high enough to get a watering can underneath, she complained that it was too painful having to keep bending down. I was waiting for just such an opportunity, and placed the tatty old black plastic water tank alongside the butt so that the overflow from the one would fill the other.
I love finding new uses for old items. If I were a Womble, I would be Uncle Buggeritaboutabit.
A short distance along from the water butts is another 'old' item.
Actually, it isn't old by my definition, it is a solar-powered water feature that little petal bought five years ago, and used for a few months. After that, it fell into the category of 'old', meaning that she hadn't bought it that spring. I stopped her from throwing it away and had a joyful fiddle. The pump, I found, still worked, but the nicad battery connections were rusty, and the solar panel had corroded from the inside. I cobbled together an old car battery, a voltage reducer, and one of my small solar panels, and it ran happily all through the party.
Moving stealthy on, but still staying on the garden theme, here is the potato patch, and the first signs that I might be causing her to rethink her 'it-must-be-new' strategy. Although the two plastic bags are brand new, the stacks of tires alongside them aren't. She even suggest we use them without any prompting.
This is the onion field (in honour of the Jazz Butcher's song), which was an old plastic box I rescued, and then used a soldering iron to weld up the gaping crack in one side which probably was responsible for it being thrown in the skip first of all. In front of them are spring onions in an old plastic crate that was foolish enough to stay still for long enough for soil to fall in it. She was going to throw it away. I think this craze for recycling things hgas gone far enough, it's time to look at repair, re-use, or even rejuvenate. (Thanks for that one, Pea, I'll plant some in your honour :)
And this old glass-fibre water tank is now the carrot plantation. Vegetables, I have been told, are mostly water, and so are permanently thirsty. Walk into any bar, in any town, and you'll find similar allotments all swaying gently in the breeze waiting for their next sprinkling to quench their thirsts.
By now you should all be realising why I am praying for rain, and collecting it when it falls. Our tap water, for which we pay the second-highest water rates in the country, is limescale-saturated stuff that stinks of chlorine. We have to pass it through a filter before using it to drink, or make tea and coffee, and when we did use it to water some of the house plants their leaves turned brown and died. A recent piece of advice for saving the planet was to use rain water for flushing the loo. Well, in our house, that's about all the tap water's fit for. I want to collect the rainwater, put it through a small reed-bed, and use it for washing. More on that in a future post.
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 2:47 pm
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