Home Greywater System

Greywater as you may know is the wastewater from your shower, bath, kitchen sink, hand basins, laundry tub, washing machine and dishwasher. It doesn’t include any water from toilets. I think we are all becoming more aware of the potential ecological benefits of greywater recycling here in the Blue Mountains. Including:

▪                Water for irrigating plants  and a saving on water bills

▪                Lowering fresh water extraction from ground water

▪                Stopping the extreme load of wasted water going to the Winmalee  Sewage Treatment Plant and the creek line below; or just to septic tanks in areas like Medlow Bath

▪                Reduced energy use and chemical pollution from treatment

▪                Some increase nutrification into our depleted soils

▪                Recharge of our many local aquifers and endangered swamp communities

and more I’m sure…

The juggling of recycling the water from my family’s bath, shower and washing machine has taken many forms over the last 20 years, it’s not just install once and forget, when the family’s water usage changes, you want to be able to adapt. You also want to deal with nasties pragmatically. There are some chemicals its kinda hard to avoid, whether it’s the dregs of hair dyes from teenage girls or the possible watery residue of chemotherapy.  Being able to switch the system over to mains let’s you filter and process easy contaminants that break down easily, but divert back to the main system when you need additional capacity which the mains sewerage has to treat these extra unavoidable pollutants.

As you might expect, every State in Australia has its own rules. For the Blue Mountains the NSW Office of Water suggests the following:

Use	Description	Requirements
Manual bucketing	Small quantities of greywater are captured in a bucket for reuse outside on gardens or lawns	No council approval required
Diversion	Greywater diversion devices redirect greywater for use outside the home on gardens or lawns using sub-surface irrigation	No council approval required under certain conditions. Needs a plumber to install
Treatment	Greywater treatment systems for reuse inside the home (eg toilet flushing, washing machine) as well as outside on gardens or lawns	Council approval is required. Needs a plumber to install

My two arrangements are diversion systems. The first distributes water from my washing machine to my orchard, which is perfect my my few fruit trees.

So how does it work? Well  the pump from the washing machine directs water to an olive barrel, where it collects for not more than 3 hours when it is again pumped (this time by a small submersible pump) and transported through a typical polypipe irrigation system onto the tree roots.

The second is a little more complex and uses the water from the bath and shower.  It too is collected in a tank with the water pipes being intercepted through a soft rubber funnel that I bought from the hardware. This water is released by gravity feed through a hoses and a number of ½ terra cotta pipes filled with gravel. This allows UV radiation to clean the water as it trickles along to 3 drainage pits that are inter-connected like a reed bed system. The first container holds charcoal, the second gravel and azolla, whilst the third contains sand and some reeds. Frogs spawn all along the system, so I’m assured it is not environmentally friendly.

Every few years I clean it out and start again…the last time was during out Autumn PDC. Many hands do indeed make light work.

http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/watersaving/greywater.htm for lots of helpful information and contacts

Find out the whys and wherefores of water saving and repurposing in your permaculture life with local water systems expert Michelle Maher in our upcoming Spring Part Time PDC – be quick, the course starts in just 2 weeks time on Friday 5th October continues Fridays and Saturdays for six weeks.

Spring is in the Air

 

As I look out my back window at the quince and the peach beginning to bloom I am reminded of the wonders of fruit trees.

The weather is always a little unpredictable around this time of year, when the wind whips and the petals beak and swirl in whirlpools in the air. Poor weather conditions, during flowering are just one of the things that leads to poor fruit production. Excessive rainfall or over watering will produce weak sappy growth and little fruit, whilst a shortage of water will result in flower and/or fruit drop. Stress from high temperatures will lower flower development where as cool temperatures lowers the viability of the pollen. Cold, wet and windy conditions during bloom can reduce insect activity in the area.

Most fruiting plants have specific temperature ranges in which pollen viability and fertilization success are at a peak. Changes from these temperatures often results in low fruit yields. In temperate climates many fruit varieties require a certain amount of cold weather of the Upper Mountains in order to fruit normally. This requirement which varies with the cultivar is referred to as chill hours being accumulated cold-season hours below 7°C. For more on chill hours check out our previous post The Chilling Facts of Life

You may notice trees in blossom buzzing with bees at the moment, that’s our glorious pollinators are getting busy as the weather warms up. Pollination is a key concept in fruit production and consequently must be understood in order to maximize productivity and yield. Only pollinated flowers can bear fruit. And in the case on dioecious species (6% of plants only) like kiwi fruit – then only female plants bear fruit. To further complicate things some fruit trees like apple trees are cross-pollinators, this means they are incompatible with their own pollen. So generally speaking they require pollen from another apple of a different variety (including crab apples) in order to produce fruit. In a cross-pollinated system, honeybees, wasps and other pollinators allow the transfer of pollen from one plant to another as they drop a little pollen collecting from plant to plant.

For two such plants to successfully pollinate each other not only does their pollen have to be compatible but they have to be producing the pollen at the same time, If there is no source of pollen within the optional distance and flowering at the same time, pollination will not take place and fruits will not form. Plums and pears are cross pollinators too. Talk to your neighbours about what fruit trees they have already or are thinking about  buying, if they’re within 500m you can cross pollinate your trees with theirs. If neither you nor your neighbours have any compatible trees nearby, it is possible for branches with blossoms to be brought in from a different area and placed in drums of water close to the tree requiring pollination.

Self-pollinating fruit trees include apricot, nectarine, peach, sour cherry as well as currant, gooseberry, blueberry, strawberry and raspberry plants. They do not require an outside pollen source, although they often seem to produce better if there is one. I find the term ‘self pollinating’ a bit misleading, we still need our insects friends to spread the pollen from flower to flower, and trees will often be more produce more prolifically if compatible cross pollinating plants are in the vicinity.

Pears are similar to apples, with the notable exception that pear blossoms are much less attractive to bees, due to lower sugar content than apple or contemporaneous wildflower  nectar. To make up for thiees hives are often introduced in commercial enterprises.

Don’t worry too much if you tree doesn’t produce fruit every single year. Talk to local fruit growers about any regular (or irregular) fruiting patterns they’ve observed, local knowledge can help demystify the variations in our production cycles, the links between weather and other environmental patterns are not always obvious.  Some trees only flower every other year, this is known as alternate flowering. It’s especially common in apple and crabapple trees. Some say that thinning excess fruits in an “on” (flowering) year will help to conserve the plant’s resources and reduce the occurrence of subsequent “off” years.

While there are reports of 200 year old apple trees still going strong, it’s not uncommon to find that older trees decline in fruit production. If you inherit a slightly sad or neglected old fruit tree, never fear, a good pruning & a little TLC  can make a big difference.

Make friends with the Heritage Apple trees at Blue Mountains Organic Community Gardens, which we’ll be visiting as part of our upcoming Spring PDC.

Thanks for jnyemb and daveeza on flickr for sumptuous Spring pix and info from:

Dan & Dan Forest Services Yass NSW- www.dananddan.com.au

EarthWood – Our Fruit -users.netconnect.com.au

(I recommend a good old wassail around any fruit trees,  all that good cheer certainly can’t do any harm)

12 Principles of Chickweed

We define weeds as a plant growing out of the place where you want it or growing at the wrong time. Sometimes these are plants that grow easily in a place, from ‘garden escapees’ with parts breaking off and being carried by birds, or downstream through the catchment, sometimes seeds even hitch a ride on travellers’ shoes or in the folds of their clothes.

Common Chickweed (Stellaria media) in Nashville, Tennessee. Each flower is approximately 5 mm across. Public Domain Image via Wikipedia

Does this lovely little flower deserve to be cast aside as ‘merely a weed’, a plant ‘in the wong place’? its only fate to be removed where ever it has the misfortune to grow? Well not in my garden. Chickweed are edible tasty and nutritious, and better still they grow during winter when a continuous homegrown supply of greens isn’t always available in my cool climate garden. The Japanese celebrate this little plant as one of the Seven Herbs of Winter and its used in a traditional dish welcoming the return of Spring (or wishing for it!) There are a couple of plants that have over the years been locally known as chickweed in the Blue Mountains, Stellaria media – Common Chickweed and Cerastium sp – Mouse-ear Chickweed.  Worldwide there are literally 100s of plants known as chickweed. Why? Could it be that the chooks like them? Mine certainly do, and they know when they’re onto a good thing. (Same goes for Duckweed etc….

Our ‘Common Chickweed’ then is described as a low, inconspicuous, annual groundcover 8 to 20 cm tall. It forms mats around 40 cm across, with tiny delicate oval, smooth-edged leaves (1 to 2.5 cm long) that end in a small tip. These grow in pairs and lie opposite each other across the stem. The stem has a fine line of hairs that extend along one side of its length. Super small white star like flowers are a distinguishing feature. They are 3 mm across, with 5 petals so deeply divided they seem to be twice that number. Mouse-eared Chickweed is even smaller and is hairier to the extent of being considered sticky. People with skin allergies to the daisy plant family can sometimes react to chickweed.  Once you know these plants they are quiet distinctive, but if in doubt get someone who knows to show you. If you snap the stem it does NOT produce a white latex sap. If you see a milky sap, then that’s probably ‘Petty Spurge’ aka Euphorbia peplus, which like all the Euphorbia family is definitely not edible (but still useful).

Spot the difference: Euphorbia vs Stellaria below

The act of using this simple little ground cover plant wonderfully illustrates our 12 permaculture design principles

• Think before you pull the weed out, as there’s a lot a weed can tell you about your patch of ground. Chickweed tends to grow in cultivated improved and more fertile soil, so if you were looking for a spot for your cabbages, which thrive in poor soil, best pop them somewhere else. You can use the chickweed as a companion for another plant.  Observe and interact

• All that sunlight going into photosynthesis and making the chickweed grow – I could think of this plant as an unwanted weed, or valuable crop. Added fresh into a salad or creating a pesto or a salad dressing By freezing any leftovers it can last for over a year.  Principle Number 2 is Catch and store energy.

• This often under appreciated plant can be made into other resources like poultices, salves, tinctures which you might trade with your friends and neighbours who are not sensible enough to- Obtain a yield

• Considered a weed in the lawns and horticultural enterprises, many people would not think twice about using chemicals to manage this plant. Reason tells me this is overkill, with its shallow roots it is so easy to pull up by hand. Keep pulling them though, and you’ll soon discover that there’s a seed bank of thousands of seeds down there, so if you really don’t want to grow chickweed, change the soil conditions so that you’re not favoring this plant. It’s important if you really don’t want chickweed coming up on your patch to Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

• Chickweed is available in you garden during winter months so why import basil to make pesto, from some other climate zone which will use all those food miles’ petrochemicals when you’ve a resource literally at your feet. The Japanese even honour this little herb in the spring-time festival, Nanakusa-no-sekku – Use and value renewable resources and services

• At the very least if I’m not inclined to use a bumper crop of chickweed as food or medicine I recycle it through the compost and not through landfill. That way I value and making use of all the resources so that nothing is throw away – Produce no waste

• One of the things that makes weed species so successful is often how long the seeds are viable and able to germinate, for common chickweed seed, this is up to 18 years. When you understand all sorts of natural models and cycles, that work you can manipulate such knowledge to your advantage – Design from patterns to details

• Weeds are often called pioneer species, because they build up nutrients and form pathways in disturbed soil. Chickweed contains lots of important minerals (including magnesium, iron, calcium, manganese, phosphorus and potassium) which return to the top layer of soil when it dies off. If we are in a mindset to fight weeds, we pass up ac companion planting opportunity to along with our intentionally planted crops. In this case the addition of vitamins and minerals makes for stronger more vigorous veggies  So … Integrate rather than segregate

• When planning a garden, using examples from Nature that work means less work for gardeners like you and me.  Minor and leisurely adjustments like allowing  chickweed to coexist in your garden as an alternative mulch can make it easier to maintain than traditional cultivated gardens, you won’t discover your ideal companion planting gems unless you.. Use small and slow solutions

• Growing single crops in monocultures requires a lot of energy inputs both in work and petrochemicals in the form of fertilizers & pesticides.  A diverse garden confuses pests, and builds a healthy polyculture, which can actively resist insect attacks and other threats. So leaving some weeds in place is also a way of putting into practise  Use and value diversity

• The boundary between what is acceptable food or medicine has changed beyond all recognition over the centuries, and our diets have not necessarily improved for all these changes. Some of these older  herbal remedies are once again becoming valued and productive. Chickweed has long been included in winter herb salads in areas where it grows wild. It’s also one of the seven Winter herbs celebrated in Japan. Use edges and value the marginal

• Who know with the possible onslaught of climate change, information about all sorts of weeds may be useful for all the above reasons and more. In the mean time I’m happy to add it to add this my list of plants to grow, so when I really need them, they’ll be there so I can – Creatively use and respond to change

Learn more about Permaculture Principles and put them to use in a Permaculture Design Certificate Course near you – see courses

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickweed

http://www.myveggiegarden.com/companion_planting.htm

Recipes

http://grannyearth.com/weeds/chickweed-stellaria-media

www.susunweed.com/herbal_ezine/February09/grandmother.htm

http://berrybluetoes.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/chickweed-recipes

http://www.learningherbs.com/chickweed_pesto.html

The Chilling Facts of Life

Oops! I’ve just put in an order to buy a couple more of these fruit trees, there’s barely space left but I just can’t help myself. If you’re considering buying any bare root fruit or nut tree this winter, it’s worth taking a good look at the needs of the tree first. Not only is it important for a fruit tree to get sunlight, air and water, many of the trees we rely on for fruit and nuts rely on a good deep winter dormancy to produce fruit the following Summer.

Both pome fruit trees (with a core and pips like apples & pears) and stone fruits (cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots plums etc) need cold hours to stimulate the massive phsyiological changes these trees undertake in the noble pursuit of fruit production. Pome fruit especially rely on a good long chill, and there are also berry plants which also need the cold including raspberries & blueberries. It’s amazing to think that the productivity is directly brought about by that winter chill. And this is one of those rare occasions when us cold climate dwellers get to be the envy of people living in the tropical, sub-tropical and even the warmer temperate areas. You’ll see in fruit tree suppliers’ catalogues like Woodbridge, Daleys or Diggers that different species and cultivars and their rootstocks are variously described as having Low, Medium or High Chill requirements which vary from species to species.  Traditional apple varieties have a minimum chill requirement of about 1000 hours, that’s a ‘high chill’ requirement for an apple tree. Use this ready reckoner to estimate the chill hours for your area, based on the average temperature of your coldest month of the year.

Using this method, Katoomba comes in with an average 1200 chill hours whilst Springwood’s milder climate gets around 1100 chill hours.

It’s important also to consider how variable the seasonal conditions are too, particularly if you’re aiming to provide for your fruit needs from your own trees. Too few or too many chill hours can interfere with a tree’s ability to fruit, so look at the maximum and minimum chill hours as well as the average to understand the range of winter your area has historically experienced.

Our climate is changing, and that’s another factor to take into account in a long term fruit production strategy. In this visualisation of Sydney’s seasonal temperatures, you can clearly see that the lower temperatures shown in dark blue decreasing over time, indicating milder winters, with less chill hours.

 The band of blue is also narrowing as it fades meaning winter is also getting shorter.  In the upper mountains its a familiar story, the snows don’t come down in big drifts like they used to. In Katoomba if the temperature rises as predicted, we’ll see an increase in temperature by 2 °C on average over the year, which will bring Katoomba chill hours down to about 1000. That will knock off very few varieties out of production. In Springwood, which is currently marginal for high chill requirement fruits, its a different story. That 2° C increase in Springwood would drop their chill hours well below into 900 , so they’ll either have to get a bit nifty with engineering cooler microclimates around their existing chill requiring trees or perhaps get more familiar with trees traditionally grown at latitudes nearer the tropics.

Find out more about trees, climates and resilient strategies for food production with Katoomba Street Permaculture’s permaculture design certificate course this Spring.

Words by Sue Girard & Kat Szuminska [CC-BY-SA 3.0]

Crabapple photo by Tatania12:flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Awesome Seasonal Temperature Visualisation by Hatchersan @markact

Illustration Resources graph courtesy of http://www.newcrops.uq.edu.au/acotanc/papers/campbel1

More information about growing fruit trees (especially apples)

South east Producers Association (SEPA) http://www.davewilson.com/homegrown/gardencompass/gc14_jan_07.html http://www.orangepippintrees.com/articles/fruit-tree-minimum-chill-requirement

http://hydrology1.nmsu.edu/nmcrops/Trees/apples/ http://www.aussieapples.com.au/ http://www.motherearthnews.com/blogs/blog.aspx?blogid=2147484355

Way out West: Permaculture in the Blue Mountains – part 1

Now, rumour has it that there are more permies per head in the Blue Mountains than anywhere in Australia. This being the mother country of Permaculture, it seems hard to imagine that there might be a greated density anywhere else in the world.[1]

Just in case you’re an absentee landlord, frequent overseas intrepid adventurer or other breed of occasional mountain dweller then before reading on you’ll need to know that Permaculture is the art and science of designing truly fabulous sustainable ecological systems that benefit all forms of life all over the planet, including you. And a permie, is mostly used as an affectionate term to describe anyone who has successfully completed a permaculture design course (most likely way to begin to see the permaculture way of thinking). So you should be nice to them.

As if to prove this point, last week saw the launch of a new book down the hill in Sydney. ‘Permaculture Pioneers’ as the name freely identifies, showcases some of our finest ecological system designers in a chapter of their own, and features two iconic mountains residents, Stuart Hill (Foundation Chair of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney, BSc (Hons), PhD, Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal) and Rowe Morrow (Dip Perm. B. Agr Sci (Uni Sydney) BA (Uni Qld) MA (Reading UK), Dip Rural Soc (Sorbonne Paris) Cert Hort (Ryde TAFE) Dip Ed (UTS), Donald Groom Fellow) ). Now, a new generation of permaculture designers, educators and farmers are now growing up standing on the shoulders of their inspirational work; in her view, family permaculture demonstration farmer in nearby Mudgee[2], Milkwood’s Kirsten Bradley applauds the book’s  ‘ability to un-smudge the origins of some ideas and parts of the permaculture movement.’

The name Permaculture Pioneers is also a nod to ecological succession. Pioneer species, often identify as weeds. They draw deeply from hard won resources in their environment by their ability to thrive in conditions where others don’t even survive, and produce alot of productive seeds in a short period of time.  Weeds break up the ground, and do the hard work, allowing gentler folk, er I mean plants  to come in and be nourished by some of the good nutrients the weeds made available. Early adopters were often open minded hippies, and there has been some association thus with minority alternative lifestyle groups until recently.

Twenty years later and we appear to have sorted out the ‘woo woo’ from the ‘wow this really works’ and now permaculture is no longer in the fringes, but its ideas are accepted into the mainstream, its even being adopted by governments around the world into everyday policies;from the city farms of Cuba to the city of sydney’s bike lanes governments are getting the message, and solving problem with sustainable systems  thinking that makes sense.

[1]I have no idea if this is true, but I like to think it might be.

[2]Milkwood.net the Blue Mountains nearest and dearest sizeable permaculture demonstration farm.

Watch Stuart Hill’s presentation in the Blue Mountains