As usual, the hustle of life here has me busy enough to where I take photos to share, but never quite get to the blogging! So I figure I ought to take a few minutes today and tomorrow and catch things up!
To begin with, this is the garden shed. Or, shall I say random shed? Presently there are assorted garden tools, irrigation items, paint, a table I needed to put somewhere for a project, and the geese like to hang out in there. Yes, that's right, the geese. Despite having free roam of the property, a play house, their own pool and open enclosure, the geese like to nest by the planter boxes and sleep by the garden, but hang out by day in a metal garden shed. Goofy!!!! But then again, they live at our house! Does anyone else have goofy geese like this?
With the monsoon season drawing to a close, we had very little total rainfall, most of it garnered in the two inch storm yield midway through the season, and very little actually stored. We had been able to complete the prototype water harvesting barrel a few weeks back, but when the rainfall from the hurricanes working their way up from baja California began to fill the prototype barrel and the extra overflow barrel that was out, we knew we needed to prioritize the project!
One of the barrels we had already had this rubber section of hose attached. This needed to go, but fortunately came off pretty easily. There was actually a threaded bulkhead underneath, which had me pretty happy since it would give us two barrels with threaded bulkheads and two with a new kind I picked up at the aquaponics store.
In another spot on the same barrel was one bulkhead that was capped off. That would have been fine, but it was really filthy Poor Wyatt was sweet enough to volunteer to crawl inside and clean it out all the way!
While that one was soaking in ACV, I cut off the lid of another barrel, just like the prototype version. Then I set it to soak with the ACV as well, while working on setting up the bricks to keep it off the ground and high enough to put watering cans under the spigots. Additionally, I wanted them high enough that overflow could pour out across the top to the successive cans, making it easier to separate them to clean them out periodically without needing to move them as a unit or re-plumb them!
Last weekend, I had needed to go in to work at the college to deal with new requirements and reporting, and the aquaponics store had been just a few miles down the road from there. I picked up some new things to try in place of the bulkheads, called Uniseals. While the snap into place through the holes you drill, and tighen up around the pipe when you put it through, they do move some, and can be pulled back out. I used the same hole saw with these, though a bit larger than with the traditional bulkhead. The man at the aquaponics store felt strongly that these have lasted better than the others in his own yard, as plastic breaks down severely in the Tucson heat and sun.
This is the Uniseal. Have you ever tried them?
This is my fancy dancy little hole, made with the hole saw. And some muscle, too.
The seal really did pop right in as advertised.
I took a break to do a walk around at this point, having washed out the tubs and gotten another round of ACV in to soak and make sure any last residues would be gone. Bailey had a minute, so she came up to help me dump this tub. Notice that it looks like a black lagoon in there? This is what happens when you don't have a lid on your barrel- algae! Ugh, that is like an algae bloom in the ocean messing with the life balance where they appear- NOT something I plan to use on our gardens! We carried the tub together and dumped it in a tree well under some ornamental cacti and the like, where it would be okay and still useful.
After rinsing out the gunk, I went back to my project in process. This is the barrel with the Uniseal in it The guy at the aquaponics store loves these, and I admit that on top of the flexible material aspect, the ease of installation could also make for smaller openings and the possibility that we could have less gunk potentially getting inside. Still, that meant no actual threading, which has me rather nervous in terms of the spigot being knocked around or out or that leading to a leak. They use them more in the way of one tank connecting to another, so they don't seem as likely to get the abuse that comes with being so accessible.
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