Spring Garden

[ancona]

Well, it's about time to dig out the spring garden and plant for summer. We've gotten a hell of a lot of food out of an abbreviated garden, since we only planted about 4,000 s.f. this spring. It has been unseasonably dry, with the exception of a week of gully washers we had a while ago. We're getting in to the swing of summer and are having nearly daily showers in the early and late afternoon, so it's time to dig it up for the second planting.

 

[ancona]

So, it looks like my attachments are too fooking big. I'll try to shrink them down a bit.:flail:

 

[rblong2us]

still looks quite green ancona.

did you ever do the stealth borehole ?

 

[ancona]

Yup.......fucking salt water. We got 5800 ppm salt at 62' and still had 1600 at 85'. I pretty much gave up. I am looking at rooftop collection and retention in a set of blue water barrels. My primary interest is sanitation in a grid-down situation. We were without power for a very long time after Charley, Frances and Jeanne tore through here a few years ago, and the lift pumps to the water tower were only able to stay on for a few hours a day, so pressure was never where it needed to be. I was afraid of bacteria infiltration because of low pressure so we bought a Big Berkey, but that didn't help us with laundry, bathing or washing dishes. I figure if I can sequester six barrels of water, we should be pretty well off. We get 6 feet of rain a year down here, so they would mostly stay full all the time, and each time it rains, the old water gets pushed out by the new water [bottom fill].

a well would have been ideal, but I guess I'm too close to the ocean.

 

[rblong2us]

Six feet of rain a year and all you can find is salt water, a bitter iony methinks (pun intended)

Is there no nano filter that will pull out enough salt to make it useful for something ?

And if you run the pump for a few weeks, will the water improve as a result of it moving through the ground ?

There was a fella from somewhere round your way called Dan Winter who was using vortex tech to remove salt from wellwater but hes lost interest in this ( probably didnt work that well ) and gone for more whacky ways to treat water ...........

 

[Jay]

Ancona, Penns tomatoes migrated to my garden....

celebrity


cherry

 

[DCFusor]

ancona - should you want to do rain collection, I have some years of hard experience in making that work well enough to do sanitation, and sometimes drinking (in low pollen times). I'd be glad to share, there are some simple tricks that let you shed the other junk and keep the better water for use. I might have posted some of it here already.

Also, the electroplating company I use sells a reverse osmosis machine, worth some gallons per day. It runs a few times the amount of water through it that you get pure, but the output is PURE. Kind of pricey, and you need fairly high pressure to run it. With any filtering system, you need to prevent organic junk getting in, or it rots in there. This thing auto-back-flushes. Well, they used to sell it, ref here:
http://forum.caswellplating.com/used-items-sale/4998-10-gal-day-reverse-osmosis-system.html
This gives effectively distilled water - it would easily handle your salt concentration.