I am mostly not there.
But it is. The land. The yard of my family with its potential for pure homemade food providing plants to be grown. So I take it seriously to make some use of it although I am not capable of taking care of it often enough.
But what is enough?
If they still live, the plants, if I can reclaim some land from the wild overgrowth...from time to time...It's still worth it to me. We're still growing stuff ourselves, we're still getting somewhere.
What we need is a system.
A system to keep the land free of wild growth to some extent and I have talked about that. I bought a hoe. I want no poison, no chemicals, no fire, nor any other not ECO-friendly methods.
The second part of the problem is irrigation.
What I am most concerned about are the young trees I just planted this year and the grapevines you see in the picture above. No time for things that grow for one season only and require lots of water. Not right now, anyway/
.
I have two things in mind...
Setting up some mulch-relying culture and...
Setting up some automated, though primitive, irrigation.
We got a source. A well of underground water which is free, pure, and unless you dry it up by consuming too much in a go, it's there to stay. To be replenished, actually.
So I thought of something primitive, sustainable in terms of...not needing electricity anymore and not giving me the opportunity to waste too much.
My grandfather used an electrical pump, of course, being an engineer and all that. The pumps we had got broken and I am currently not going to replace them. I wanted to know how much would I be able to get by using...
A reel, a rope, a bucket...
As you can see, I bought a couple of small-ish containers with plastic taps mounted on them. I still got some hoses that I can connect in a simple manner, and I got bottles and buckets left to use instead of throw away.
Yes, I can buy some irrigational shenanigans, the systems that only allow small droplets to be cast in regular intervals but that's in the future.
I'm still in my primitive mood.
I wanted to make a test.
I had these two containers and they can hold up to 130 liters total. To fill them up by casting the bucket down the well and pulling it out by rope, I needed...
...about 40 minutes.
Some exercise.
Distribution after that was the easy part but I also wanted to leave some slowly drained containers behind so I made holes on the caps of several plastic bottles and put them bottoms up into the soil. The vacuum would be a problem. I wanted to know how big a problem was so I put small holes on the bottom of some of the bottles, too. That would allow them to breathe. That would drain them much faster, though.
I couldn't quite detect how fast.
The next time I would visit would be three days or so away.
I am mostly not there.
Peace!
Manol