Rain, Rain, (Don't) Go Away

It's funny for me how after a lifetime of living in urban areas, you just come to expect that if you turn a tap on water will come out.  Living in the Cottage we quickly discovered that this is not always the case now!

First it was when we ran out of rainwater on one of the rainwater tanks.  Then it was when the main pump failed.  Then there was a time when the inlets to the washing machine were blocked so we couldn't wash clothes.  Then there were all the issues in the gardens and paddocks.  I think you're getting the picture!

Our water set up for our household purposes is highly reliant on rainfall.  Given the name of the blog, you can probably appreciate that this isn't a significant level.  In average terms we are supposed to receive just over a foot of rain each year (approx 390mm), but our actual rainfall for the past two years has been significantly below that (only 230mm throughout 2015).

Historical average of local rainfall

We are very fortunate that we do have access to a water system (the GWM Pipeline), however that water is untreated and supposedly only for livestock, gardens and general household usage. Our drinking water, and preferably the household water, is reliant on rainwater.  Our water infrastructure consists of four 5,000 gallon/20,000 litre rainwater tanks, plus another tank for the Pipeline water. Two of our rainwater tanks are on the main house, with another on the back Hay Shed, with these three connected to a small pump and the house directly.  The Workshop shed (middle right of below photo) has the fourth rainwater tank plus the pipeline tank connected to a bigger pump.

Little Desert Cottage:  House (top), Workshop (middle), Hay Shed (bottom)

Normally we operate off the rainwater for the house, and the pipeline water for the gardens and stock water.  The pipeline water needs to go into the tank primarily because it is lower pressure coming into the property (it comes in on only a 1 1/2 inch poly pipe), but also so that there is some water on site in case of supply issues (eg. major fire events could cut supply, but at least we'd have water available to fight the fire).

That's normal set up.  We generally go through a tank of rainwater every 4-6 weeks, but that's reliant on consistent rainfall to keep topping up empty tanks, so this is were the fun starts.  Here's three critical steps we need to take to keep on top of our water management to always have water available.

1. Maintenance

Fun in the rain

Whether you're in an urban location or out on a rural property it is critical to make sure whatever water is falling on the roof can get into your rainwater tanks! While we don't have many trees around the main house itself, I'm always amazed at how much leaf litter can build up the roof plumbing.  Then when we do get a heavy rainfall it can't get into the tanks quickly enough and overflows (therefore is lost as potential water for us to use).  Clearly preventative work such as keeping gutters clear is helpful (as well as reducing your fire risk), but it sometimes means getting out in the rain to clear away any other blockages that arise.  After our last downpour I discovered a blockage, but the force of water coming through kept bringing more material.  It was only by climbing a ladder in the rain that I could keep on top of it, otherwise we'd have lost another 1-2,000 litres.

2. Proactive Management

This week's forecast

It looks like we should get a reasonable amount of rain this coming Friday, but perhaps even a little rain in the next few days.  1-5 mm isn't much but with our roof area, including the workshop and hay shed, approaching 900 square metres, every millimetre of rain (1/25 of an inch) is 900 litres (225 gallons).  The difficulty is that this is spread over 3 buildings - if any of the tanks are completely full, they'll simply overflow and that water is lost.  To help with this, we regularly move water around.  Generally we'll operate off the main house tank, and we can switch to the Hay Shed tank to draw on that.  Otherwise, we can switch the main pump over to the Workshop rainwater tank, and then run that water through the garden taps to run a house into the main house tank.  Using these methods I can operate with most of the tanks fluctuating at 50-80% of capacity.  This way we've usually got water in the main house tank, but still have room to capture everything that falls.

Most of our tanks are currently around 50%, so we've got around 40,000 litres stored.  If we happen to get 15mm over the next few days, that will add around 13,500 litres to our tanks.  If the 40,000 litres were in only the back tanks (so they'd be full), we'd only collect around 5-6,000 on the front tanks.


If a massive storm hit and we received two inches of rain, all of our tanks would be overflowing - but we'd have enough water to get through until May (end of autumn rains)!

3. Reactive Maintenance
Even with everything that you try to do proactively, there's always something that comes up.  Here's a shortlist of some of our challenges this past year:

• Burst pipe on a far border of our property that I never drive along,
• Cows damaging valves in water troughs (causing them to overflow),
• Cows 'tripping' electrical systems to stop pumps working (no water for livestock on the hottest day of the year),
• (Me) digging through pipes that I didn't know where under ground in garden beds.

Some of these are easy to fix, others take a little time and effort.  My background as a professional and living in urban areas used to be to default to calling a plumber.  Not so easy here!  With all these maintenance requirements, it's a case of having to work backwards to find a solution. Turn the pumps off, find the issue, work out a temporary fix and then find a permanent solution.



Life on a farm is very different to life in an urban environment.  Water is just one of the many challenges we face.  Despite the steep learning curve, I'm thankful that this aspect of our life has taught me how to deal with manual and physical work to find a solution, and not just simply relying on tradesmen to fix my problems, or even having to rely on the pipeline for our water as our first option.

What challenges do you have with your water supply, and how do you overcome them?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Tomato Propogation

When I grew up I can always remember that tomatoes were a staple that my dad grew every summer. They were relatively easy to grow, you could always use the produce, and as I was still a child they were a plant that he could teach me many of the basics of gardening with.  Even techniques such as pruning.

Our Roma tomato patch

For those that haven't had that background, tomato plants have what are called "laterals" that grow along the main stem and can grow into a new stem.  Generally gardeners will remove some/most/all of these to concentrate growth and production of tomatoes to one main stem.

Lateral (red arrow), coming off the main stem. Laterals always grow at the junction of the leaf and stem.

I've recently read about how those laterals can be used for propagation of new plants.  Where I really am interested in trying this is with heritage varieties of tomatoes.  I've tried growing lots of varieties of tomatoes, but the germination rate isn't very high, and they often grow a bit slower than some other varieties so I haven't ended up having the full season to get a harvest.  With this new way I've come across, I'm thinking that I could justify buying a heritage variety as a seedling early in the season and then propogate further plants from that seedling.  If that's within a greenhouse by early summer I should have 3-6 reasonably established plants from that one seedling.

I figure it is worth experimenting so I'm giving it a go using my Roma Tomatoes as a trial.  Our garden has four strong Romas growing this year so there are lots of laterals to choose from.  Romas also generally have strong laterals - the laterals might be as thick as the stem they are growing off.

Once I worked out which laterals looked strong, I placed them into the base of a soft drink bottle.  It isn't rocket science, but so far appears to be working well.  I simply leave it near the garden (in full sun) so that I can keep the water topped up.

Tomato cuttings after around a week. New white roots showing best on middle cutting.

After the roots have grown a reasonable length I'll transplant into some potting mix and put in a shadehouse to get established.  It might be a bit late to end up with some highly productive plants, but if I can get them growing at least I'll be able to have a go next year!

Torta del Pastore

Here's a little fix of culture, food and frugal living tips for today!

One of the simplest ways to help with a frugal lifestyle is to use your leftover food as much as possible.  Makes sense, but there is a huge amount of food that is thrown out everyday because we don't practice this as much as we should.

Actually, one other alternative is to ensure you eat it all at the first meal, but that's probably not the healthiest attitude to have to solve the over-eating problems we have in the Western world!

Having just had a particular meal the previous day, it's not always appetising to have the exact same meal a second day in a row.  That's what happened with us last week after having a great dish of Spaghetti Bolognese.  Rather than having it again, we mixed it up a little by turning it into our Italian version of Shepherd's Pie - Torta del Pastore.

This is a really easy recipe, and can use whatever other foods you have around the house.  For our family, we added cooked carrots and peas to the reheated spaghetti sauce, and put that in the base of a casserole dish. Because you've used the rich spaghetti sauce as the base, you don't need to add gravy or flavourings of any sort.

Sauce with vegetables

Then we layered some mashed potato over the sauce, and added some grated cheese, which created the Shepherd's Pie.

Pie after potato and cheese has been added

 Into a hot oven, grill or broiler to melt the cheese, and you have a delicious, hearty and simple meal!

Half eaten pie, delicious!

We ended up with four serves from this dish, but you could add more vegetables or potato to bulk it up a bit more if you needed more servings.  A quick side salad gave a bit more variety to the meal too.

Yogurt Making 101

One of the challenges I have around homesteading is trying to work out when you're better off buying something directly as cheaply as possible compared to doing it yourself.  As an example, last year we grew a patch of beetroot (which required watering, weeding, etc to grow the crop) and then spent an evening cooking and bottling to preserve them.  They taste fantastic, however out of ten jars we bottled we have only used around two jars! Perhaps buying two cans as needed through the year would have been better.

With that in mind yogurt making is one area that is definitely worth the investment for me.  With four young children, we can easily go through two or three kilograms of yogurt a week.  Thanks to Rhonda at Down to Earth, I've found a recipe that works brilliantly for making a large batch - seven one kilo jars tonight alone.  This batch will keep for a week or two, but by having it the kids can go crazy. The brand I base it on costs around $7 for a 1kg jar in supermarkets, but has only cost me around $5, and an hour and a half, to make 7 jars worth!


Yogurt is made by fermenting milk, so the idea is that you need clean equipment (saucepans, utensils, jars etc), and pasteurise your milk to kill off any bacteria.  Then once the milk has cooled slightly, though still warm, add the good bacteria back into the milk and the fermentation process can begin.

The recipe is also quite flexible.  I will often use regular milk, however tonight I used powdered milk that I made this morning and then chilled for the day.  This meant that the milk was properly reconsituted, plus it kept the cost low.

Milk starting to boil, with the milk powder added

To start with, you'll need to gently heat your milk, for me this was six litres.  Once it has heated a little, I then added some extra milk powder (a little over half a cup).  This increases the amount of lactose in the mix which is what will ferment later to make the yogurt. With this extra powder added, keep patiently heating this to almost boiling - 90C/195F. As mentioned above this kills all bacteria in the milk, both good and bad.

Milk heating up to 90C

Using a thermometer really helped with getting this right.  I've made it before, without any problems, using small bubbles on the outside as a guide, but with the thermometer I realised that I was taking it off the boil a little too early.

Milk cooling in sink

Once it's hit 90C, you want to cool it reasonably quickly to below 50C.  I put the whole pan into the kitchen sink, and then moved the water in the sink (gently) to help cool the milk.  By lifting the pan and letting water under, swirling the water around and also swirling the milk inside the pot, you're increasing the surface area of hot liquid "meeting" the cold liquid.  Just makes the process a little quicker!

Once below 50C you can add you good bacteria back into the milk, and then it needs to go somewhere where the mix can stay in the 40's for a reasonably long time.  Part of the reason that I make a large batch is that I can then throw all the jars into an esky, and surround it with warm water.  The heat is then retained overnight, and I can keep it warm for at least 12 hours. By that stage - it's solid yogurt!

Esky full of yogurt

Just prior to refrigerating and really setting it, I add my flavourings.  Below is some berries that I took from the freezer, but the one the kids love - HONEY!!!  While the yogurt's still warm, mix around three dessert spoons of honey into the yogurt and then put in fridge to cool - it tastes fantastic!

Mixed Berry Yogurt

The big lesson I've learned after making this a number of times is to do with your starting yogurt.  The better this is, the better your yogurt will be.  I've tried using cheap yogurts, and you end up with cheap tasting yogurt.  You're better off spending an extra dollar or two getting a good starter. In our case, we used Mundella Greek Natural yogurt (non-sponsored link, I don't think you can order direct through their website anyway!).





Yogurt making is a great way to use some homesteading skills to help with saving some money in your home, and a real treat for your family.  Let me know what your favourite flavours are that you've made.

Preparing For The Heat

Today is forecast to be quite a bit hotter than usual for this time of year. It normally wouldn’t be the end of the world, but lately one of the reasons our Mummy Pig has been getting out of her pen is to have a mud bath. To try to stop this today I’ve put in place a few things to keep her in. The sheep and calves get free range of the paddock, so they just find some shade to keep their cool and aren't an issue.

Forecast for today is 100F/38C, and already at 10am we're above average for Nov

One of the first jobs I started last night - making some big ice blocks! I figure that later today when the heat really comes in, I can add these to her pen or drinking water to help cool her down.  The blocks are only the size of take away food containers but they needed to be in the freezer overnight to be cold enough today.

This morning’s priorities were to clean out her drinking water to give her some cold, fresh water.  She has a concrete water trough so when it gets mud etc in it, it can be very difficult to clean out.  I deliberately left it to go low yesterday to have a solid clean out (or a clean out of the solids!) and to refill it with clean water.

Clean Drinking Water

Next up was a mud bath.  Not having a mud bath isn’t usually an issue,  but since pigs can’t sweat,  it is their way to cool off in the heat.  Previously Mummy Pig would tip her drinking water out to make her own mud.  By deliberately flooding a patch of dirt for her I get to control were the mud bath is.  Hopefully keeping her in the pen at the same time!

Mud, Glorious Mud

Finally, when I feed her today, I’ll also spray her down with water,  top up the drinking water (with ice too) and the mud bath.  This way she shouldn’t get out and make her own mud bath in the cow & lambs drinking water!

How do you keep your livestock cool in the heat?

New Beginnings in a New Homestead

Welcome to Little Desert Cottage!

Since you’re stopping by today, I am going to assume that like me, you have a level of interest in homesteading or a (semi) self sufficient lifestyle. Also like me, you’ve probably read a stack of information that is available online, in print, on television and DVD, but still have some questions.

Perhaps you are simply interested in what it is like running livestock using non-commercial methods, particularly if for your personal consumption. It might be that your climate is different to that of some other sources of information. Sometimes it’s just seeking another perspective to see which approach you will personally take.

Our new homestead

One of my frustrations in looking at other blogs, videos and books is that our climate is very unique. Being in Western Victoria, our climate is considered Warm Mediterranean – BUT – our location presents some challenges we’ve not had previously:

• Low rainfall (average less than 12 inches/300mm pa)
• Heavy Frosts during Winter and Spring
• Intense Summer heat (average 31^oC, but regularly above 42 ^oC)

The Hay Shed

This combination affects particularly what we can grow in the garden for our personal consumption, and certain fodders for livestock. The warm summers would normally suit tropical fruits with irrigation, but the heavy frosts through winter complicate that. The late frosts hamper growth of certain summer vegetables because waiting for the frosts to pass then means they get hit with intense heat in early summer. We do have a great climate for grains (wheat, oats, barley and legumes (fava beans, chick peas, lentils), but also unreliable with the last two seasons having significantly lower than average rainfall.

Long story short – join our adventure and learn from our successes and failures as we try to adapt what we’ve learned to be more self sufficient on our homestead!