The catchment system for the backside of the house is working beautifully. Rainwater is caught in a blue barrel. Through gravity it overflows to a wine barrel which empties into a concrete fish pond. Pond water can overflow into a small wetland that encircles the pond with reeds, bamboo, mints, verbenas and lillies. The wine barrel is a relic of a former electric-pump waterfall the previous home owner had installed.
This is a pretty simplified system. We don't disperse the rainwater for irrigation or for reuse in the house. Those are the next steps. Still, this serves as a pretty straight forward example of getting started. A lot of folks don't make progress on redirecting rainwater because it seems daunting and expensive. Dispersal is cheap. Advanced recycling for home use is where the costs and planning become much more serious.
This quaint little set-up will be used to grow adzuki beans. It also covers the hugelkultur pile and is made from excess bamboo harvested from the yard. I originally constructed it for playing in, but it turns out none of the bamboo was tall enough to build something adults could fit in. So to the garden it was sent.
With the help of their permaculture design students, the
Planet Repair Institute have laid forth
plans to redesign of their entire city block for the future. The vision includes
block-wide water capture systems, thermal hot water systems, energy capture-distribution systems, composting and soil building, food forests and seed-saving to name a few. Naturally, this colossal undertaking requires a lot of coordination and buy-in from the neighbors since it directly involves modification to their homes.
This suave group of planet repairmen convinced their neighbors to let students investigate their homes and lifestyles for the purpose of redesigning each lot for greater abundance, resource capture and integration with the elements.
I was lucky to be involved with two lots. One was a rental property so there were limited suggestions we could give to a tenant who may not be on the property long enough to participate in a lifelong investment. However, the neighbor adjacent to the Planet Repair folks seemed to be more permanent and I had a lot of fun with the design.
An early sketch of food and water additions to the home.
We found great opportunities for the home owner to amp up economic opportunities from the property: reducing utilities costs by insulating the home, utilizing specific surfaces to either absorb or reflect heat, and to reduce municipal water use with rainwater capture and greywater gardening. We found room on the south side to build a trombe wall greenhouse, with multiple uses and plant food forests to the north side. She even had an empty garage which could serve as a community root cellar, brew house, bike shop or art studio - all things which could bring in a little rent.
Conversion of the garage as a multi-use space for food growing and rental income.
Integrating a permaculture design for a single home with a unified design for an entire block was a serious undertaking. The zonal, social and economic factors spin a web demanding careful navigation. However, the sheer liberation of such a design from the "grid-life" is empowering enough that I believe Planet Repair and their neighbors will undoubtedly succeed in it's implementation.
