Water Retention Strategies

This is the beginning of the research for water retention.

Rain Garden - A rain garden is a planted depression that allows rainwater runoff from impervious urban areas like roofs, driveways, walkways, parking lots, and compacted lawn areas the opportunity to be absorbed

Ozy Wastewater system - interesting how they actually use the waste water to flush.  Also interesting to see how much more water the shower and bath use than anything else.  Making use of an outside bath / shower as i've been wanting to do for while and then re-using that water could be a good idea.

Reduce your lawn - Turfgrass is one of the most water and labor-intensive types of "gardens" you can have. Consider planting groundcovers or low-maintenance perennials instead.

Graywater - a comprehensive resource about greywater planning.  It seems very modern but in the end is selling a drip tube system.  But lots of good info.

Create an Oasis with Greywater - by art ludwig.  He's supopsed to be one of the authorities on this stuff

Rainwater harvesting for drylands (vol 1) (vol 2) - by brad lancaster - again he's supposed to be an authority on this stuff.

http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/ - Brad Lancasters site

http://oasisdesign.net/ - art ludwigs site

2 months without water.

After a couple of months away from the garden and a couple of devastating heat waves the hole garden has gone to shit.  The soil has died and all the fruit trees have gone as has the lawn - not much of a surprise there.   It took 2 years to get the garden to where it was so it's a bit disappointing to take such a large leap backwards.

However, what this does prove is that whatever we were doing was not sustainable.  No matter what work we did, what we planted none of it was sustainable without a more integrated and sustainable water retention strategy.  Using our grey water was good and was showing results, but the solution needs to be deeper than that and take in to consideration a natural sustainable water retention strategy.

We've got some ideas such as the water sink that we tested with the grey water, and of course water capture from the roof.  But we need to do a little more research in to other methods of water natural and sustainable water storage.

So, I guess we're starting from scratch but this time with the aim of designing a solution that essentially survives without human input.

 The soil is totally dead

 The hugelkulture is the only place that has any signs of life

 The tomato plants here are still alive and there are even some tomatoes left.

The other potager is totally dead.  The soil looks pretty terrible too.