Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

In a message dated 6/22/2007 7:07:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
billj AT harborside.com writes:


> Maybe you'll think that gardening is still fun after you have to raise 
> all the water for your garden 100' with a hand pump. 

Correct, not 100 feet in my case, more like 25.  I have an ancient pitcher 
pump in the center of the garden and it lifts the water 25 feet from  a catch 
basin in a creek some 120 feet away.


 If you calculate 

> the caloric expenditure involved with pumping that much water, it would 
> add several hundred calories onto your day's total, after chopping wood 
> and before all else.  

Yes, if you raised water 100 feet by muscle power, it would take several 
hundred calories of food.

>We opt not to do that, for obvious reasons. 

Sorry, you're dealing with a dull luddite here.  It's not obvious at all to 
me.

 >The 

> reason why these systems are possibly more valuable to us than to you is 
> that we're 3 days away from a dead garden once the power goes out, since 
> the electric pump we're stuck with now allows for no other options.
> 

I have no idea how long my gardens would last this summer without irrigation. 
 We get a thunderstorm every ten days or so be we are  more than 11 inches 
below he normal rainfall for the year so far.  Some things would have died 
for 
sure, many more would never have germinated and transplanting would have been 
impossible.

I'm  don't disparage the use of electicity especially for such applications 
as lifting water where you get a lot of return for the little expense that it 
costs.  In  my case the water and the creeks are more than 2000 feet from the 
electrical terminus and I am not inclined to run commercial power down the 
mountain side to the gardens.  Manual pumping is a feasible alternative just 
as it 
would have been for the fellow on the web page who was lifting water 35 feet 
at the rate of 75 gpm.

My observation is that the present thrill seems to be to be able to stand 
back with arms folded and watch that energy-intensive-to-produce, 
not-necessarily-sustainable, system work while the idea of just pumping it by 
manual labor is 
viewed with ghastly horror.   </HTML>