The rain makes 100

I've been waiting for a special reason to post this, my 100th blog entry! What better way to celebrate than by reporting the first good rain of the season. Literally, all my bowls runneth over! And the birds that use them every day are diving and dipping in a particularly carefree way. They too no doubt know the rains have come.

The distortion inside this bowl is the effect of rain pouring down, filling it and every other garden receptacle that until now I'd been topping up by hand. And even though we only got 33ml, this rainfall on Saturday had a serious feeling to it. It came down hard and fast.

Now, two days later we are sweltering in the kind of temperatures that usually precede a storm, so I'm hopeful there's more rain to come. In any case, the garden has been completely refreshed and the dust of winter washed off all surfaces.

I walked around the house to admire the dripping scenes from all sides. And after the storm, both Allen and I went out to enjoy a strange pastel sunset. I was too awestruck by the pale blue and tangerine streaks to think of photographing it, but I doubt the camera could have done it justice.

Only those of you who have relied on rainwater for your household needs can appreciate how much it means to feel the first rain of the season on your face. When I lived in cities I never even knew what time of year the rains came – or if there was a time when it rained more than at other times.

Now I can smell the rain coming. And if I have any doubt, I can walk down into the paddock and see if the ants are building up mounds of soil at the entrace to their holes. I'm not sure why they do that, but how high they build gives a pretty good idea how much rain we'll get. No matter where I live in future, I'll never take rain for granted again. Nor should we.

The dam is full

Our water pump's intake valve is bobbing nicely out there in the deepest part of the dam at the bottom of our block, thanks to two weeks of rain totalling 630mm (about 25in). Water flows down to our valley from nearby Mt Panorama, feeding half a dozen or more dams before it reaches ours.

All of them must be overflowing by now because the often dry creekbed below our dam is not yet the raging torrent it can sometimes become, but it's flowed steadily for more than a week now.

Good to know my 2010 garden will be well watered, even if the price we are paying right now is murky-coloured water in the toilet! That's because we pump dam water up to a holding tank at the top of the block, from where it flows by gravity down to the cistern as required. This saves precious rainwater for more important uses. It also means the cistern doesn't lose its water supply if a power failure should shut down the pumps for a while. Fortunately, that doesn't happen very often any more. But it's something you must prepare for when you live in the countryside in a region where tropical storms can cause occasional havoc.

Clean water for the house

It's time to chlorinate the rainwater again. We use this water for all indoor purposes except to fill the toilet cistern, which is fed from a different holding tank that contains dam water. We decided years ago we would treat our rainwater with sodium hypochlorite from time to time. That was after we took a water sample to the local Council's health lab for testing. We'd been suspicious that the water may have been a bit 'tainted', and the lab results confirmed that at that time our rainwater contained some unpleasant bugs. With possum racing around the roof on most nights, a couple of ducks who regularly land on the roof before hopping down to the pool and bats flying overhead regularly, the house's gutters inevitably end up containing a few unpleasant souvenirs of these otherwise welcome visitors. So we feel our drinking water should be purified regularly. Water filters that can eliminate bacteria are very expensive and need to be changed frequently. And cleaning the gutters is a big job that we can't do often enough to ensure a pristine water supply. Chlorinating the tank water is the best solution to this problem, we think.

So about once in each season, we begin by checking the volume of water remaining in our 40,000 litre concrete holding tank. Then we add the correct amount of liquid sodium hypochlorite to kill any bugs. We obtained information from our Council about the appropriate amount to add per 1000 litres; you should check for yourself what your council's health officers advise. Then you have to know the formula for working out the volume of a cylinder (V = πr²h). Mathematical calculations are a problem for anyone with aphasia, so Allen's happy to leave this part of the job to me. Even so, I need to look up the formula every time we do it! Allen keeps a long piece of bamboo for measuring the 'height' of water in the tank; the radius, of course, remains constant. So, using the radius and height-of-water data, we calculate the volume of water remaining. After that it's a simple matter of mixing the correct amount of sodium hypochlorite into a pailful of tap water, adding that to the tank and using the bamboo pole to mix it in and splash around the water in the tank. Not long after we finish this task, we will detect a faint odour of chlorine when turning on house taps or having a shower. It's no more than you would have in city water, of course, but here in the hinterland we notice it right away. That's why we also installed a chlorine-filtering water fountain on one side of the kitchen sink, so we never need to 'taste' chlorine in our drinking water. The chlorine smell soon dissipates. Anyway, a temporary odour is a small price to pay to know that any traces of animal faeces that may have washed into the water supply aren't going to give visitors diarrhea or stomach upsets.

Postscript: In March 2010, a tank and water expert inspecting our tank informed me we should NOT be using sodium hypochlorite in a concrete tank, for a bunch of reasons he enumerated. And we should NOT boil our rainwater before drinking, because of the bad effect this can have on any gum leaf residue that may be in the water! (What about making tea, I ask! Get a product called 'Aqua-flo', he said, if you must do anything. Best of all, just keep the tank clean. Easy for him to say, when the only way to clean a 10,000 gallon tank is to first empty it out. Our water level hasn't fallen below half since we stopped using that water on the garden and got access to dam water for that purpose. Not easy to throw away 5000 gallons of good rainwater just for the sake of a spring clean.

The valley in flood

After big summer rains, water roars down the creek and floods the valley. At one end the dam becomes a raging waterfall, and I wonder where the turtles shelter. But when the dam settles down again, there they are: heads bobbing and saucer-shaped shells just visible beneath the water.

Setting the scene

 Home is a small cedar house sitting at the top end of a rectangular block that runs downhill in a westerly direction and ends in a very old farm dam. This lovely expanse of water would have been built many years ago when this one-and-a-bit acre was part of one of the original farming properties in the hinterland. We share this dam with several other blocks -- i.e. all of us property owners have 'riparian' rights (that’s a great word I learned while living in a city that had the Mekong River as one of its borders). The property on the opposite side of the dam rises quite steeply from the water’s edge, so when we look down toward the dam from anywhere on our block, we see only a thickly treed hillside on the other side of the dam, above a reedy border of undergrowth along the water’s edge, where wild ducks and swamp hens regularly patrol. So this deep, dark water at the bottom of our block always feels like a peaceful and very private oasis.

The dam also extends up along the valley into a property at our left, making a very large expanse of natural-looking waterway fed by a creek that flows down from a steep little mountain at the end of the valley, a kilometer or so upstream. That source means we enjoy a reliable supply of water throughout the year. Ever since we wisely invested in a tough farm-style pump and laid down underground pipes to bring the dam water up to the farthest corner of our block, we have had water on tap at seven different locations around our block. That may be something about which it is ecologically irresponsible to boast. But even though I’m a confirmed heavy mulcher and selective irrigator (I certainly don’t water any lawn; in fact I would happily do away with all grass if I had the energy or resources to plant out and care for an acre of trees and shrubs throughout the years it takes to turn grass back into bush), nevertheless I have to confess that my life here changed forever on the day our wonderful ‘pump specialist’ installed the irrigation system and we turned on the first tap bringing that luscious water uphill to the veggie patch and fruit trees and other less utilitarian plantings.

I suppose I could create an irrigation-less garden somewhere if (or when) I eventually have to move to a smaller ‘town’ block, where water rationing is the norm. But for now I'm afraid I probably do use more water on the garden than I should, though I certainly no longer indulge in the kind of water-dumb practices that we older folk remember from a time back in the pre-El Niño Dark Ages, such as watering driveways, instead of just sweeping, to clear away fallen leaves. And I know it's only rationalisation, but I remind my guilty self that any water running off our property goes straight down the hill, back into that life-giving, garden-saving dam.