The garden,the rain and making bio diesel

We have decided to give the wicking garden beds a go this year. Our soil here is so sandy that the moisture does not hold. We are just wasting our water as it is not enough to get the vegies growing properly. It is a struggle.

After visiting Gavin's blog where he was making a garden bed and following the link he had there, we now have a fair idea as to what to do and how they work. A big thank you to Scarecrow for this easy to understand way of gardening.

We have purchased the black plastic to line the bottom of the beds that hubby has made. And we have bought some soaker hose, hubby reckons that should work better than the hose shown in the description, especially if we go away in the heat.

We plan to set up a timer up on the tap so the garden will still get watered.

The beds that hubby put together...

The soil is saturated from all the rain we have had yesterday and today. Total received from the heavens to date is 43mm (172pts) or 1 inch, 72pts. It is still raining on and off today and blowing a screaming gale along with it. Not much fun outside at the moment.

Here are some pictures of the storm yesterday,

Lightening and thunder all day with wind and eventually a deluge of rain that flooded areas around our town.

My parents live at Kimba, about 150kms away from here and they had 63mm (252pts) in 1.5hours. The hardest hit town from the storm in South Australia. Dad's workshop shed became flooded, so he had to put a hole in the back wall to release the water.

The black clouds building up...

Leigh Creek, north of here has had over 100mm (400pts)

The rain storm has been widespread across South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria and probably else where, with many places experiencing flooding.

Hubby took an ore train to Broken Hill at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon, but had to pull up at Yunta because of the water over the track. A taxi from Broken Hill came out to pick up hubby and his mate, and take them to Broken Hill, they didn't arrive there until 4 o'clock this morning.

wet, wet, wet

The rain water tanks are overflowing...

The gutters couldn't hold the water...

The plants are loving it...

Hubby has shown a keen interest in making our own bio diesel, since a friend showed him how he made it. He is collecting information, resourcing, and making the equipment to use to make this possible.

Hopefully soon we will be using bio diesel in our Land Cruiser, and that should save us a lot of money.

This is what hubby has done so far:

Cut a gas bottle down, welded some legs on, and added 2 3/4 gate valves.

.

This will be used to heat the resourced oil, methanol and caustic soda in. The tap on the bottom is used to drain the thick solid oil particles out and the one on the side is to drain the bio diesel, ready to be strained.

It then will go into the storage drum (next to the ex gas bottle) for two weeks to let the particles settle, then it should be ready to put in the car.

I will keep you posted on how it goes.

This book has been an excellent source of information.

I hope you are all having a great weekend,

xTania