Water

We are so lucky to live in a developed country where we have water on tap, literally. There are millions of people in our world who don't have access to clean water or water that is close to their homes. We only have to turn on the tap and out it comes into our kitchen and bathroom sinks, into our showers and washing machines and onto our gardens.

Growing up we had to be careful with water as we had no town water, we had rain water and used dam water for washing and we had think about what we were doing. My parents have lived back in town for many years now but still conserve water even in the rainy times, and these habits have been good during drought.

So here I am living without town water and relying a lot on the rain. I really do think about rain a lot as we go without it for so many months and the tanks levels drop so we really do need to keep our water usage in the front of our minds.

It really makes you appreciate water though, for the most part, the majority of us don't think much about it at all, we turn on the tap and out it comes, but what happens if one day it doesn't happen? How would you feel?

In the last few weeks we have had our water pump for the house die, and then it was revived about a week or so later and now our bore pump died but I don't think this one will come back.

It was suggested to me to use the house rain water tanks to water the garden, the wet season is coming so it will be right. The wet season might be coming but it isn't here yet, I thought it had started when we had rain last time, but it wasn't, it was just one lot of rain. So I could use the house water, however I could do this maybe once as the house tanks are under half and the wet season is late. Gardens use up a lot of water and using up our house water is not a good idea.

So yesterday I was bucketing the rinse water from the washing machine onto the garden so everything wouldn't die, it has been rather hot here. We managed to get an electric water transfer pump, and while it isn't powerful enough to get the bore water up, it easily sucks out water from the dam and I can now hand water the garden from there. It will work for the short term till we can replace the bore pump.

Would you believe it, it rained last night. It was very exciting and of course I went out to listen to the water falling into the new little tank out the front, a lovely sound :) This new little tank has a tap on the bottom and we can drink out of it if we need to so it is great to hear it filling.

We ended up with 57mm in the gauge this morning, so the tanks got filled a bit, and the garden and orchard got watered so I am very happy, I really hope this is the start of the wet season for us.