Growing ideas

An interesting discovery I've made about my thinking process living out in the woods is how sometimes it takes a while to see the obvious answers. Perhaps it's a change in my perspective due to age rather than my surroundings, or perhaps that I work in more practical applications now than I used to... or maybe just I need more solutions more often.

The most recent example comes from dirty water. In the plans for the house, I had made up a complicated gray water system that could hold about 50 gallons if need be so that I could then distribute that water with a hose to the fruit trees when I got around to it.

This summer, instead of doing the typical 5 gal buckets at the end of the drainpipe, since we had a good crop of raspberry and blackberry bushes, I 'stretched' the capability of the hose and had it just drain out right into those berry beds. The main reason I hadn't before is that it's almost a horizontal run from the yurt to the berries.

Now that the strawberries have finished producing, I'm putting the gray water there, to encourage runners and new growth for next year.

All this leads up to my realization of the obvious: I don't need a complicated system for the house, I can just have the drains go right to a hose, and just move the hose every day or whenever I get to it. I'll just have a switch for wintertime, where I can send the gray water out into the woods when we don't need it for the orchard. Easy and simple. Took me 3 years of thinking to get to the simple answer.

The blackberries (with bird netting on it now) are VERY happy to have had all that gray water in the month of July.

And the peaches are starting to look good too. Another week or so before they'll get eaten.