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KiwiMum
Chief Moderator Joined: May 29 2013 Status: Offline Points: 29680 |
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Posted: June 30 2021 at 2:36pm |
Well July is here already. I'm pushing ahead with prepping our vege garden for the coming spring and am expecting a whole truck load of mushroom compost to arrive early next week. I'm also itching to place a seed order but am waiting for the new seed catalogue to come out shortly. I heard that in Australia there's another toilet roll shortage due to the sudden lockdowns, so that's made me stock take our supplies. I should be buying more weekly as we use it up but tend to just get a load monthly as and when I remember, so I need to stock up on that and also dog food. We have just purchased more fuel cans and these are full and lined up and labelled !!!!!! which has never happened before. We always relied on hubby's memory to tell us what's where and in which can. So at least our generator will function for longer if need be. When it's raining, I'm watching Youtube videos of inspirational vege gardens. |
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KiwiMum
Chief Moderator Joined: May 29 2013 Status: Offline Points: 29680 |
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There's something else really exciting that we're doing. Yesterday I put a temperature and moisture sensor under our house. It's a wooden house on piles and the area beneath the house is a crawl space varying in height between 1 and 3 feet and it's fully sealed in on all sides with earth retaining wall and then earth is banked up outside that to raise the height of the garden around it. I'm hoping that we'll discover that the soil keeps the underhouse temperature at a constant cool level. We're monitoring the temperature because we're thinking of putting in "Queenslander air conditioning". This is an electrical free convection system that just involves making a hole in the floor of our larder and then putting a solar chimney in the roof of the larder. As the sun hits the single skin steel chimney it'll heat the air within it causing it to rise, and as it does, air from beneath the house will rise up into the larder, thereby cooling it. I'm so excited about this. We've only been talking about it for 5 years!!!!! and now we're actually doing it. |
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EdwinSm,
Moderator Joined: April 03 2013 Status: Offline Points: 24065 |
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I do like the idea of the "Queensland air conditioner", especially as it does not take any fuel to run and will function in the event of a power cut. My prepping will involve a lot of watering the garden to keep the food plants alive. Stored rainwater has been used up, so it is down to the hand pump in the garden. The well might run dry - the previous owner had to move the location of the well as some land was lost to the road being straightened - and they quickly found out that that the new well ran dry so had to hook up to the town supply for use in the house - so I only use the well for the garden and for water to flush the toilet, but it still ran dry two years ago. |
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KiwiMum
Chief Moderator Joined: May 29 2013 Status: Offline Points: 29680 |
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Edwin, what many people do here is to string together water tanks and then fill them in the winter and then use the water in the summer. All you do is set up a syphon with a bit of old pipe between them and as one fills, the water level rises in each tank. I knew a woman in Auckland who had 4 huge tanks joined like that and she kept an enormous garden and her house going all summer even when there was no rain for months. |
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KiwiMum
Chief Moderator Joined: May 29 2013 Status: Offline Points: 29680 |
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Our truck load of mushroom compost arrived yesterday. It's a much bigger pile than I had envisioned - and I've got to move it all with my little wheelbarrow! Anyway it's lovely looking stuff and will hopefully produce some really great veges. |
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