Big Homestead Water Upgrade! Irrigation, Greywater & Vineyard Plans

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Spring on our off-grid homestead in South East Queensland means heat—and huge water demand. In this episode we look to upgrading our homestead water system to save time and boost efficiency: tying together garden, orchard, lawn, pigs and a future vineyard with automated irrigation and smarter plumbing.

We start with morning chores (feeding the Wessex Saddleback pigs) and talk through why we’re automating demand now that our automated pumping and water storage are dialled in. We plan to route greywater from the washing machine to the lawn, extend a main water line past the gardens to the pig paddocks, then across to the vineyard site to prep for drip irrigation. We also need to re-install the garden irrigation we removed for winter, check the greenhouse (seedlings thriving!), plant out banana pups, and build a passionfruit arbour at the garden entrance.

If you’re into off-grid living, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and water conservation in Australia, this one’s for you. We talk through the decisions that need to be made like layout and irrigation setups to reduce daily workload and improve food security.

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Good morning. Happy spring. The pigs have seen me already. So, let’s make a coffee real quick. We’ll go see them and then check out what we want to get done today. [Music] They are making noises already. As soon as they see us in the morning, they’re like, “Breakfast time. Why aren’t you feeding us?” Good morning. I think we’re going to have Piglet definitely by Christmas judging by the well morning activity. Hamilton here was learning the routine this morning and figuring out what his job on the farm is. Only he had things the wrong way round. So yes, he was up on her head. But maybe within the next few weeks he works it out. And the timing of that is 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days. So by Christmas piglets, which does mean we need to prioritize building another little shelter cuz if one of these girls gets pregnant, hopefully both of them, then by Christmas time, they’re going to need space to raise piglets in. Yep, pig move is definitely on the cards this weekend. They finished this first lane. I bought a whole bundle of star pickets, so I want to formalize this top section. That’s like the common area that doesn’t change, but they’ve got to move. And then the question is, what are we going to do with this space? Well, I’ve got an idea. What if we use down here for more crop sort of things rather than planting crops of potatoes in something that we’re trying to turn into a food forest? Yeah, makes sense. So, we would do like traditional kind of rows like cropping rows of what would we do? Potatoes. I was thinking onions. Yep. Garlic. Potatoes. Corn potentially. I really want to try that wheat. Ah, that ancient grain. We’ve got some corissant. Okay. So things that either take up a lot of space cuz you need to grow a lot of it like wheat and corn or things that you want to grow a lot of cuz they could store like potatoes. Makes sense. And I’ve been wanting for a while now to run a main water line down through here cuz I think it will solve a number of problems. Number one, I’m manually topping up pigs water. Number two, that needs to become a vineyard at some point, which means irrigation. And to bring water down from the gardens, we’ve got to come past the orchard. So that means we could formalize what’s going on water-wise in the gardens and in the orchard. Okay. So it sounds like we need to prioritize water systems and irrigation. But the one thing I am actually super proud of that has worked really well has been this pig waterer. 1,000 L. I haven’t had to check it in 2 and 1/2 weeks. And if it was hooked up to permanent water, I could just control it with a float valve. So that’s another reason to get water down here. Well, speaking of water systems, one system I haven’t had to check on in a couple of weeks now has been our water tanks. I hear the pump come on occasionally, so I know it’s working, but is it keeping our tanks topped up to 100%? I think so. Let’s go and check it out. Yes, water at the top. Float valve is keeping it topped up to 100%. And as soon as that float valve closes, the pump down there just stops pumping. So our 40,000 L stays topped up all the time. Hey, another thing about the water. Oh, good thing it’s not undies. The water from the washing machine that we’ve been using to put on the ground in the orchard. Yeah, I wanted to use it on the plants, but I can’t because of what’s in our washing powder. And we use a pretty natural like Kirsty makes her own washing powder, but even then the ingredients in washing powder are too salty. There’s all sorts of salts. So lawns, okay, gardens and food, no. I’m just thinking instead of moving the hose around all the time, like is there something that we can do if we’re thinking about water anyway? Yeah, cuz I noticed that that hose has only got a short reach and it’s making the ground real soggy. Yeah. I think the answer is actually right here. I’ve still got two IBC tanks from our original water system. Yeah. Yeah. We could put a little pump on that and then we could just basically have a lawn watering system. Anything grass. That’s amazing. I know you want me to plant some more lawn seed. I see what you did there. I mean, I can plant the lawn seed. So, this is another reason we need to kind of look at another go of the water system and the water lines is because there’s no irrigation in these beds. So, I’ve been hand watering, which is fine in the winter. That’s only been every couple of days, but it’s getting to be nearly every day, and it takes me nearly an hour. And as much as I love my garden, I don’t have that much time. So yeah, we took our irrigation system out a couple of months ago because it was causing all sorts of problems. So we do need to reinstall that with an entirely new setup. That’s a video coming later and it’s going to save Kirsty a ton of time. So it sounds like there’s a theme to the jobs that are coming up now. We’ve got to get a main water line run through the property past all of the zones that need watering. And if we can automate that as much as possible, well, it just means we’ve got more time to do other stuff. Well, I guess this is like the second layer of infrastructure, isn’t it? Like the first layer is like how do we drink? How do we shower? The second layer is all of this internal sort of infrastructure that means development, I guess, and tweaking it and making it more efficient. I mean, that’s part of the process. I want to recover time for ourselves to work on some of the fun projects we want to do. So, an automated watering system here in the orchard eventually down at the vineyard. This makes sense. means I get to grow lots of food. I’ve noticed this the last couple of days and I’ve got a tray of cabbage to do like a second planting, like a late planting. I reckon I’m going to They’ll just destroy everything. Can you show that on YouTube? So, I think I might call it with the brassacas that I can get out of here. Um, I might do that today and start focusing on the summer crops because we’re going to get overrun here pretty quickly. If anybody knows any white butterfly cabbage moth repellents that are natural, hit us up in the comments. Even if we could figure out how to automate this watering. I feel like you were just in here checking your Were you literally just in here a couple hours ago? Uh yes, like the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is come and see what’s sprouted overnight. Is anybody else a psycho like that? You plant a seedling and then like or you plant a seed and then 2 minutes later you’re like, “Are you are you growing yet?” Ah, so this is what you were talking about. You had all this extra red cabbage and what’s this one? Um red cabbage. Oh, that’s mustard. That’s good to go. So mustard could go out, but red cabbage is just going to attract a whole heap more white butterfly. So are you thinking we just let those ones go? Mom accidentally ordered 20 packets of cabbage from Eden Seeds. Well, we don’t need to grow it all this year. Well, what I’m thinking is um I want to do some micro greens with it. Perfect. Cuz we’ll never use that many. And like this here, perfect on salads and Oh, yeah. Just eat away. Yum. Yeah, but don’t even soil block them. Just do a a tray of soil. Yeah. So, I’ll put that in a video, I reckon. All right. Is this out here to remind me? Speaking of new lawns, it’s just on the list. We have this one random little patch of lawn out the front of the tiny home that was more of an experiment. We tried to just see if grass was going to grow, and it surprisingly has done really well, but now it looks patchy. It looks patchy. It looks weird on its own. So, all right, budget lawn seed to the rescue. So, we took the pups that were under all our banana trees. So, pups are the side shoots of a banana and I just knew they wouldn’t survive the winter cuz we had frosts incoming. So, I putotted them up, put them in here. We’ve got four that have done really well in here. Do you reckon like last night could have been a frost? I you know that thing is like when is the last frost and then you get one and you’re like that was definitely the last frost. Honestly, I think we could probably just plant them. The the weather’s warming up. We’ll have a bit of warning if there’s a frost incoming. I genuinely don’t. Like spring is here. According to the calendar, the weather has to behave. You’re right. We are totally new to frosts. We never had that over on the coast. And so I’m certain that was the last frost, but I said that two frosts ago. Yeah, you’re right. We can just cover these bananas. I think we get them out. We get them planted. Let’s get them growing. Look, despite the fact that we put these parent banana plants through hell and they’ve been through literally four or five frosts, they’re not doing too bad. And there’s new growth in there. I think they’ll be fine. [Music] They’re not in the straight line. If you never stand here and look up the row of bananas, you’ll never know that your OCD is about to be offended. Hey hey heyo hey up hey hey up hey heyo heyo [Music] I had an idea for that riome mesh we found the other day. You know how I said sounds like another job in coming. Yes. If you’re standing there, I’m going to tell you what I’m thinking. No, I just love Here’s how it works on our homestead. Kirsty goes, “I’ve got an idea.” Or, “I’ve been thinking about or I saw something on Pinterest.” Pinterest. Bloody Pinterest. All right. What’s your idea for the Rio mesh? Um, you know how I said that we could grow something off it? I was thinking cucumbers. But what if we made an arch out of it for the passion fruit and that’s like the entrance to the gardens from the house? cuz they’re going to take off in a minute. Okay, that’s a nice easy one. While you’re watering these bananas in, I’m going to go and get that out and see if it’ll actually work. Okay, this is what Kirsty’s talking about. This is one of three entrances that you can kind of cut through this 30 m long herb garden. And at either side of this entrance, at the end of last summer, I planted two passion fruit, one here, one there. So, an arc or an arber over that could be really cool. Let’s go grab that riome mesh and see if that’s going to work. Not bad. If you’re a hobbit, I think we’ll cut these eye gouges out, but that could work. Hey [Music] sh [Music] yeah yeah hey yeah hey yeah hey So, I did it. That’s the brassacas that I can get rid of. The ones that are all kind of done. Don’t need There’s no more shoots. There’s no more heads. So, chickens. Yeah. Look. Get out. They got to go. Yeah. Cool. Um, I mean, we could always compost, but that’s awesome cuz I’m running low on chicken food. So, Oh, you’d think we never feed them. We are getting a really good amount of eggs at the moment, like at least a dozen a day. But number one, we don’t eat that many eggs. And I want to be incubating these and expanding our flocks. And I can’t do that. I said this a couple of videos ago while all these breeds are mixed in together because we’ve just got mishmash genetics going on here. And so they have to be separated for 30 days before I know I’m getting purebred eggs out of them. Some of you suggested I could maybe divide this yard up doing kind of like a star pattern and divide the breeds up that way. But I’d have to build a shelter for every breed anyway. And something that we want to do come the first half of next year is meat birds predominantly with our kwombies. But we might also get some Cornish cross in or we’ll just see how we want to go about it. But to do that, I really want to do them in Joel Salatin style chicken tractors. So I’m off to Bunnings tomorrow to buy a bunch of gear to build. Well, if we build four chicken tractors and I leave one of our five breeds in this yard, that’s the five separations that I need. So I think that’s how we’re going to approach that. And in the meantime, we’ll just keep making heaps of omelets. There’s always one random chicken that wants to lay on the ground. All right, 14 today. All right, so the task ahead is we need to collect up all our irrigation lines and some poly pipe to start to put this water system together. We ripped all our irrigation lines out of our gardens in the winter because we just got the setup wrong. So, I’ll explain all of that in an upcoming video, but we need to lay it out and kind of program it in a different way. I know all those irrigation lines are down there in the bush somewhere. We dumped them down there. So, I’ll have to go and collect them up. And then I’m going to need some main poly pipe to connect it all together and run it all the way down to the pigs and the future vineyard. And I’m pretty sure I’ve got some spare poly pipe up behind the sheds here. But the best news is I don’t have to use our little lawn tractor and garden cart to do this kind of work anymore because our car’s back on the road. So, if you didn’t know, we were in an accident a couple of months ago and insurance was just a nightmare. It ended up being easier to elect to have them pay us out and we wouldn’t have got into a panel beater this year anyway. They are just overrun. But I’m not especially mechanically minded. But I’m fortunate enough to have a brother who is an actual mechanic. And so he walked me through the process of doing some front end repairs, a whole radiator swap out. And the main thing is we’re back on the road. So that’s going to make a world of difference to us. You just you can’t homestead without a vehicle really. And we’ve been lucky enough to have friends and family kind of support us over the last couple of months in getting to town when we needed to. But if you were to ask me what kind of vehicle you need on a homestead, it’s got to be something with a tray. All right, that’s going to do it for this video. I’m going to go and collect up some pipe work and we’ll see you on the next video. [Music] [Music]