Barn Tank

We've started on a new 7400 gallon tank that will eventually be filled from the barn roof and will be for the animals, which are our main consumer of water.

It is 16 ft x 16 ft and 4 ft tall. It is located uphill from the barn site, so that the animal waterers will all be gravity fed.

We leveled out the area that the machine cleared and then compacted it. We then added a layer of sifted sand. There are galvanized posts every few feet all the way around, with the corner posts staked out for added strength. To these posts is secured a galvanized welded mesh. And that's how we've left it for now.

We will be attaching a stucco mesh, then a tarp, then a pond liner to the inside of this structure. And then, when the tank is full of water, we will stucco the walls with concrete to make it a little more permanent. The roof will be a tarp at first, which we will later cover with acrylic concrete.

The reason we've left it at this unfinished stage is that it seems unlikely that we will get the rain needed to fill it, even a little, and we are worried that the wind and weather will blow it around before we get more rain (next June). In the meantime, it makes a pretty good cage for a toddler!

So far this year we have had 9 inches of rain, and only September remains of our rain season (with no promise of rain for the next week or two at least). Our normal rainfall is 30 inches or more. We fear that we won't even get the house tank filled this year. I guess we need to build more roofs for catchment in case of a drought - add it to the list of things to do!

For more photos, click here.

Rain Season

We have now entered rain season for real. This past month we received 6 inches, which is the lowest rainfall for July since we’ve been here, but is still better than the big nothing we had in the nine previous months. Everything is now greening up. I love the transformation we can see at this time of the year. Our view is so beautiful and every day we see it getting greener.

And more important than our view is the fact that our tanks have some water in them. We came close to running out (mainly due to the quantity that the pigs consume, especially when it was so hot), but now we have more than 3000 gallons (about half). We will be increasing our storage capacity this year to accommodate our increasing livestock.

We are still waiting for a bulldozer to come and fix our pond, which blew out last year. It is due next week. Maybe that’s the reason that it has held off on raining hard - it’s waiting for our pond to be fixed!

Rain

I haven't blogged in a long time as we have been away on a trip to visit both sides of the family. We got back home Monday night and have been fairly useless since. Leo repeatedly empties his toy boxes and touches every single one of his things before putting them all back. We're not quite that bad, but it is nice to sleep in our own bed.

The trip was pretty full, so I'll break it down into two more blogs: Florida and Shelly's wedding. But before I even start in on those, our departure from here was an adventure in itself.

We left Monday 27th October and it had been raining solidly for a week. This year has been a strange year for rain. Overall, we got 10 inches more than either 2008 or 2009, but the majority of that fell during one week in July and then the week before we left, with it being fairly dry in between.

At 9 am we were all packed and ready to go, house tidy, fridge empty, baby excited. The ground was so slick and saturated that your footprint would fill with water. We knew it would be a ride up our hill, but we've made it before without issue. In fact, we made it out the afternoon before, without an issue. Today however, our Isuzu decided it would be an appropriate time to give the four-wheel drive a vacation. Abe tried and tried, but the front wheels would not engage. We slipped and slid, but only succeeded in going backwards, and then it started drizzling.

Well, Leo and I went back inside, while Abe tried to come-along (hand winch) the truck out of its hole. He was moving it about a foot and a half an hour. So while he was out there in the cold drizzle, covered in mud, he was figuring out how long it would take to move the truck the rest of the 100 feet. He was getting despondent.

I had tried calling friends, but with the weather people's cellphones weren't getting a signal (there are no landlines around here). I finally got through to someone who turned up a little while later. It wasn't easy, but he managed to pull us up the drive.

We stopped by the river and washed our feet, legs and floor mats, and then continued on our way. We left at 2pm.

Because the wedding was near Tucson, Arizona, we had booked flights from there to Florida. Combining the two trips saved time and money, but it meant an 11 hour drive from us to Tucson. Luckily, we had given ourselves two days to get there, so it all worked out. We drove until 9 pm the first night and slept in a motel. The next day was pretty easy and we arrived at Emily's (Abe's sister) house with plenty of time to relax.

It was a pretty exhausting and stressful start to a vacation, but it did mean that our new rain catchment tank filled up and overflowed. We now have 9000 gallons on the house system.