After I carried in all the pipes, I got scared of doing the plumbing and put off finishing our greywater wetland for a couple of weeks.  Mark kindly gave me a hand cutting the existing drain and installing the connectors, and then he helped me lift the world's largest rock to expand the inlet area.

We tested the flow before adding extra rocks, and then afterwards.  It looks like it's going to work, but we'll wait a few days before burying the pipes to make sure we didn't forget anything important.

In the meantime, I got a bee in my bonnet and decided to install a tiny pond liner Mark's mom had given us years ago.  I put it at the very end of the wetland, raised up a couple of inches so that water won't flow in unless the whole thing is well inundated.  The pond has no real farming significance and will probably just be home to a couple of goldfish and maybe a lotus, just for fun.

Actually, the whole greywater project feels like fun.  I'm itching to plant into it once we get an idea for which parts will stay sodden and which will just be damp.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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