Update (Feb 9, 2017).

It’s fun to look back & see how things have changed over the past few years.  Our trees are definitely bigger, thanks to abundant washer water.  We planted 4 more shade trees and they are slowly growing, too.

But I also see how the water situation here in town has declined even more, necessitating even more strict rationing – and how we’ve come to be even more efficient in our recycling.

We put up gutters on another section of our house to collect more rain water.  We have a 1000 liter tank to use as a reservoir, but Elwyn is using it for other things right now while we’re not getting much rain.  This 55 gallon barrel collects enough for watering my plants for now.  After a few good rains cleans off the roof enough, we’ll start pumping it up into our 5000 water tank to provide water for the house.

We also set up this barrel to collect the washer water (wash cycle = dirty).  The first fruits of the barrel are used to wash down the dog kennel, wash out the garage, and flush toilets.  What’s leftover is siphoned out onto our 8 shade trees at the front & side of the yard (through the green hose or the hole in the sidewalk)

I also branched out a little on my container gardening.  In addition to another round of sweet potatoes, my okra is doing pretty well.  This is my second attempt at tomatoes.   They sprout fine, but when I plant them out into larger pots, they all died, so we’ll see if we can make a go of it this time.

Update (9/26/2013) – I dug up one of the buckets with sweet potatoes in it…and guess what?  I had three little potatoes.  I think maybe I’m watering my plants too often, so for the remaining 4 buckets, I am not watering them as often to see if they produce more.  I replanted some of the slips and they, too, are growing good.

(August 20, 2013) I am not a green-peacer, nor am I a radical proponent of ecology.  I’m a moderate, you know, take care of our world, but don’t worship it.   For awhile I had a subscription to “Mother Earth News” magazine and enjoyed looking through it.  I think homesteading would be a fun hobby, but I have another calling in life that makes that impossible at this point in time.  But sometimes I chuckle when I think how “green” my family & I are, probably much greener than many who are more vocal about how necessary that sort of lifestyle is.  But I’ll let you in on a secret:  our “green” habits are motivated by one of two reasons:  save money, or necessity.  I decided to give you a little glimpse at some of our “green” features to our home, ok?

OK.  Here’s the first modification  we made when we moved into this house.  We re-routed the washer water away from our septic tank to the rain gutter which runs down the hill.  We were afraid the bulk of our washer water would overwhelm the septic tank.  While that in itself is not particularly green, after about a year, we modified that system, so that part of that water goes to water some grass and trees we are trying to grow in the front of our house.  If it’s raining enough, we can disable this so we don’t have mud.

    Although we instituted this to save time and money, it has become even more important lately as we now have water rationing and are not supposed to water our plants.  You’ll see the buckets waiting to be filled with the water from the rinse cycle? I then carry the water to the rest of my plants.

    We suspect that the washer is our biggest consumer of water around here, so  after re-modeling our laundry room, we are now recycling our washer’s rinse water.  Before the washer drains from the rinse cycle, I move the drain hose over to the blue barrel.  When it’s time for the next load of laundry, I simply turn on the little aquarium pump my son donated to the cause, it fills the washer with the used rinse water, and there we go!  Just have to remember to replace the drain hose so we don’t accidentally fill the barrel with dirty, soapy wash water.  The last rinse of the day is dedicated to the plants.

    This one was a project of my youngest son.  Although we would love to get gutters to collect the rain water from the entire house, at this point it is not financially feasible.  But with the material we already have around here, Nate put up this gutter to fill this rain barrel.  This particular location was chosen on purpose, because the way the roof is here, this little gutter actually collects water from about 1/4 of one side of our roof.  (I have to be honest here, the first version diverted the water outside the wall to try to avoid so much water getting into my house through this screen door.  But when we started talking water rationing, we quickly decided a little rain barrel here would be nice).  The water is not clean, but we can use it for mopping the floors, watering plants between rains, etc.  The green netting is to keep the disease-bearing mosquitoes from breeding.

     These two are kind of no brainers but I’m going to include them anyway.  I only use my dryer to fluff my towels and use my solar clothes dryer for everything else.  I also do not have a dishwasher, so everything drip dries.

This is my first attempt at container gardening.  These are sweet potatoes planted into old paint cans.  In about a month, they should be ready to see if they formed any potatoes!

  I also have several herbs in pots:  this is basil, I also have dill and parsley.  I’m trying to get oregano, but can’t seem to get it to sprout…any suggestions?

   Here’s one that didn’t seem to work for us:  When we first moved in and didn’t have screens on the house, the mosquitoes were horrible!  I bought this citronella grass, supposedly a natural insect repellent and put a big plant at each door and under several of our bedroom windows.  It really didn’t seem to do much good, but for some reason, I held onto one of the plants.

Keeping cool is a huge challenge for us!  Here are some cheaper, green, ways in which we attempt to stay cool.  First of all, our house was built with this “winter garden” in the living room.  Although I hate how it rains in, I do notice a significant increase in air flow during the hot part of the year, particularly in the evenings!

   Since the evening outside air is often much cooler than the inside of our house, the boys put this fan up to bring that cooler air into their bedroom.

Then we have 2 swamp coolers (they use much less electricity than a traditional air conditioner, and cool on the principle of water evaporation).  This large one cools our dining room, and this smaller one, our school room.

I hope you have enjoyed your green tour of our home.