Practising What I Preach
Following my speaking on the need for better water practices in our community, many people have asked me to outline my own practice. It is right that those who preach should also practise!
First let me say that my wife and I have owned homes on the Central Coast of NSW for thirty years. Twenty years ago we purchased our retirement home and two acres surrounded by a permanent treed reserve. That is where we now live. We have lived on tank water until just recently when town water came to our front gate for the first time. However, we currently only use town water for drinking, cooking and use inside the house. We collect all of our roof water in a 50,000 litre concrete tank which waters the flower gardens. This has been our main supply.
We later added a 1000 litre tank to collect water from our barn, woodshed and chook house and this waters our animals. We later added a swimming pool and also a 5000 litre tank to collect water from my workshop and this is used to top up and backwash the pool as required. A solar blanket covers the pool when not in use to stop evaporation. The entire two acres is covered with hundreds of tress, (fruit, nuts and natives) and floral shrubs and gardens. Every tree and shrub, every garden and the camellia hedge is watered by trickle drip irrigation, pumped from our dam.
The dam is fed by natural run-off, all waste water from the house, backwash and excess rain from the pool, and overflows from the tanks. The dam which collects all the water is covered by lotus which provides beautiful flowers and the extremely large lotus leaves cover the entire surface reducing evaporation. The water plants oxygenate the water and in the dam native perch reduce the nutrients. A pump recycles the water through the irrigation system to all tress and plants. Every leaf and fallen branch is put through the mulcher and mulch a foot high covers every garden and tree root area to the drip line. This preserves the water.
We have free range chooks which have their own chook house, with a deep litter floor. This is shredded waste paper that comes in the mail, newspaper and confidential Parliamentary papers. After the chooks have messed on them, the paper litter is taken outside to the bins in the chook yard where ashes, shredded paper, vegetation, kitchen waste and chook manure break down to good compost which is then placed on the vegetable, potato and flower beds. Every tree and shrub is planted into two wheel-barrow full of compost.
The house and my office is insulated, and surrounded by wide verandahs and eaves that reduce the temperature in summer and provides for great rain catching areas. The courtyard is covered by shady creeper and deciduous trees which shades in summer and without leaves allows light in winter. All windows have drapes which in winter can be closed to retain heat inside. The sewerage is septic and all liquids soak into the tree roots and all solids once a year are pumped out to be mixed as fertilizer and compost.
We germinate our own plants, shrubs and trees in a glass house watered by misters, and they are potted up in a green house and automatically watered by misters. We have nine free range ducks which forage in every garden and mulch mound for grubs, caterpillars and pests, meaning we do not have to use pesticide. A solar system heats water and the swimming pool. All fallen branches and trees are sawn into logs, split and dried in the wood shed for the low combustion stove which produces hardly any emissions, for house heating in winter, and the ash become part of the compost.
We have no wind power as yet, but I hope a wind mill will one day pump water from the dam to a holding tank which will then gravity feed the hundreds of metres of irrigation pipes and drippers. Most of the work on our property is done by my wife Beverley and our son Peter, who provides us with part-time practical help and his horticultural expertise.
All water that comes onto our property or falls on it, is thus used and reused. Even on very small blocks and in units, some of these practices can be employed. We have to work with nature to conserve, harvest and recycle all the water we can.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C..