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City Kids Move to the Country – Part V

Pit-falls, projects and laughs from our permaculture journey – Part 5

“What’s that smell?” asks Chris.

“I don’t know. It’s really familiar. It smells like… cat food,” I reply.

“It smells like shit,” he says.

It’s 2:30am. We’ve propped ourselves up in bed. It’s dark. The foul smell mingled with my dreams but now we’re both awake. The windows are open and behind the bedroom is our zone one with veggie gardens, worm farm, shade house, frog pond and septic system. It’s pouring rain. Chris asks the fateful question.

“Has the septic overflowed?”

We race outside, grabbing umbrellas on the way. Sniffing high and low, the putrid smell comes in waves and then is gone.

“What was it? Was it just Jordie farting?” Chris is referring to our dog who sleeps beside the bed.

Up until last week I didn’t know a septic system needed to be pumped out every year or so. City kids just don’t have to do that kind of thing. So it’s with trepidation we’re stepping through puddles of dirty water. What on earth is going on?

Close inspection of the concrete lid shows the septic isn’t leaking. But the smell is back and it’s reminded me of the first week we moved into the house and what had been a happily forgotten experience; emptying the grease trap. Welcome to the country! One week in and I was bucketing the prior tenant’s putrefied food scraps — which had been washed down the sink when doing his dishes — and floating in grease and fat so thick I don’t think he’d emptied it during the ten years he lived here. The worst part was I didn’t know what it was; grey water or black? Septic was an entirely foreign experience. I gagged with each bucket load.

“I think it’s the grease-trap,” I say.

“Ah…”

We lift the lid and see it is, in fact, overflowing. The water has backed up and is pushing the food scraps over the edge of the sunken container, into one of our newly built veggie gardens.

We close all the windows on that side of the house, turn the fan on full and go back to bed. But lying there, in the stuffy room, I recall a photo from Jenny Allen’s book Paradise in Your Garden: Smart Permaculture Design. It was of her, holding an umbrella in the rain. The caption said something like ‘Next time there’s a downpour, take the opportunity to see where the water flows on your property’. So I put my gumboots back on, find the torch and head out again.

Firstly, I find our driveway is a river. Water is flowing so fast it’s easy to see why pot-holes are developing where gravel’s washed away. Mental note: divert the water into stage two of planned new swales. Secondly, the foul smell is stronger under the house, in my studio. The embankment at the back is suspiciously wet in the middle but not at the ends. I find a sunken pipe overflowing with brown water, flowing down the embankment and flooding my studio. It stinks.


The driveway looks like a lake…

…but lower down it becomes more
like a raging river

Here I’ve tried diverting the destructive force with a makeshift mound and trench. Drainage and waterworks on the property will need a longer term solution.

Chris joins me at this stage and we play trace-the-pipes from kitchen, shower and toilet. Our plumbing is exposed beneath the high-set house so we can see that the only water going to the grease-trap is from the kitchen sink. It then passes through a hole in the side of the holding bucket and supposedly down the now overflowing drain pipe. But instead of going down, the foul water is coming back up, turning into a badly positioned pond, beneath the house….

We go to bed and decide to deal with it in the morning.

The next day the rain had eased. The smell was still around but the pipe was no longer overflowing. Chris stepped up to the challenge of emptying the grease trap. Meanwhile I was happy to keep my distance from the procedure and instead decided to plant some natives beside the driveway. The natives will one day provide privacy from our neighbours and habitat for local birds.

Something strange happened though. As soon as I’d dug a hole, it flooded with water. Not from the sky, but from the soil. After watching this phenomenon a few times, I realised the soil was at saturation point. As soon as a hole was available, water poured out of the earth to fill the empty space. I shoved the little natives in, packed mud around their roots, placed a piece of Tania’s bamboo beside them as red flags for the whipper-snipper, wished them well, and went inside to dry off.


Water-logged ground. Not uncommon in Queensland this year.

My mum was staying with us and said, “I remember doing that when we lived at Cohuna,” motioning to where Chris was still bucketing. “And I remember your Grandmother doing it when we lived in Tasmania.”

“You’re joking?” I asked.

“Nope. It’s been the same system all those years.”

“Don’t people learn?” I couldn’t believe builders and councils still use this faulty system to deal with rural sewerage and grey-water. “What a great idea,” I said. “Lets hold all the grease, fat and putrefying food scraps in water where it can rot, right outside your bedroom window.”

Chris called out at this point, saying we were going to have to call a plumber.

“I’ve emptied about ten buckets and it keeps overflowing,” he said.

“Really?”

“Watch, it goes down, but then comes back up and floods again.”

He removed another bucket of what looked like a hearty stew gone wrong, and indeed the level dropped but then rose again with surprising velocity. This hadn’t happened when I’d emptied it about five months ago. At least then the job had an end in sight.

I didn’t want to call a plumber, imagining they’d be very busy with weather like this and a town full of septic systems to deal with. More expense and no guarantee of a solution. Anyway, didn’t permaculture have ways to deal with excess water and endorse the phrase ‘The problem is the solution (and the solution is the problem)’? Maybe we could sort this out ourselves.

“You know, I just had a similar experience when planting those natives,” I said. “I think what’s happening is the trenches where the water is meant to flow and soak into the soil are so completely saturated that as soon as you empty the grease-trap, water simply flows back to take its place and pushes up through the pipe.”

During my septic 101 lesson at a new friend’s house last week, she’d explained how grey water goes through the grease trap into trenches where it’s dispersed. If our trenches were full, saturated by all the rain, that explained why water was backing up the supposedly hygienic and council approved system, making a mini sewerage plant of my studio and Chris’ workshop.

“We need a siphon,” I said. “But the problem is one of us is going to have to suck on the end of the hose to get it going.”

“I bags not doing that,” said Chris.

I scrunched up my face showing I didn’t want to do it either.

Chris headed inside, not knowing what I had planned. I took the hose, put one end into the drain pipe and dragged the rest down the slope. No way I was going to spend a few hundred dollars on something a plumber possibly couldn’t fix anyway. Without Chris watching, I sucked on the end of the hose. It was a long hose. I could taste the air from the grease-trap. I was hoping I’d feel the water before it entered my mouth and could remove it before the siphon started flowing. But it was such a long hose. All I could suck out was foul air.

“Honey, I need your help,” I called. “I need you to crimp this end once it’s full of water from the tap, then I’ll crimp the other end and put it down the overflowing pipe and hopefully it will create a siphon.”

It worked. The siphon flowed full-pelt for at least four hours. The experience became a funny story to laugh about. Then, today, Jordie started farting again. She was blamed until we realised her smell filled the entire living room. How quickly you forget! We used the wider washing machine hose this time, as we needed to move more water after having had more rain.


Grease trap coffee plunge
Illustration by Dave Smith

I know it sounds silly, but I actually love this stuff. “It makes you feel alive!” I say, dancing around the lounge room with soggy hair and damp clothes.

“Want a coffee?” asks Chris.

“That’s our waterworks done for the day” I say. “Yes please, coffee to warm up.”

Our solution in progress, with some research yet to do, is to divert the pipe from our kitchen sink into our top swale. I’ll bury a plastic tub in the swale and fill it with worms and grass clippings, so the grey water passes through and the worms can eat the food scraps. As long as we don’t use detergent with boron in it, according to Mollison, it should be fine used in this way. I know other permies who bury their veggie scraps under a layer of mulch where it quickly becomes compost and food for the worms. They said it works well in such a humid climate. If you do that, then block the drain pipe connected to the grease-trap, otherwise it will forever be an inconveniently placed conduit for water from the trenches to flood under the house in heavy rain.

Hydraulics of the swales seem to be working. I’m surprised and relieved. Mollison says they can be adjusted by widening or deepening the trenches until they cope with rain lasting up to three days. Yesterday the water level was as high as we’d seen and thought it may overflow, but the rain eased and in less than half an hour it dropped again.


Toad in the swale

“How’d you go with all the storms?” I ask our neighbour, who’s on his motorbike spraying weeds again.

“Oh, not too bad, I guess,” he replies. “I had a fence break over the river and I didn’t know about it. Thankfully the cows didn’t get out… it’s been a lot of rain. But there we are. That’s what happens.”

“Wow, that’s fortunate,” I say.

“Yeah. Lots of rain. Usually people’s septic fills up in weather like this and they get a terrible smell,” he says, wafting the air like he can smell something now “but anyway, what can you do? You’ve just got to put up with it.”

Not on our property we’re not going to. We hope not anyway. We’ll try to make the problem into a solution, diverting the water to our fruit trees, and let you know how we go. If we have a plague of mice eating our food scraps or some other unforeseen event, we’ll have to put on our permaculture thinking caps to figure something else out. I’m sure it can’t be that difficult to design a better system than the one my granny put up with seventy years ago. It means Jordie will be let off the hook too.

11 Comments

  1. Happy days indeed :)

    I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so, but:
    Don’t you think that rather than using/expanding your swales and have them alleviate the symptoms of what probably is compacted soil,
    it would be easier to ask around for someone with a Keyline plow to come over and tackle the cause once and for all ?
    It would still be permaculture alright.

  2. where do I find parts one thru four…?
    from this city kid in a foreign country looking for all the help and info he can

  3. I heartily agree with Ryan! I love to read your updates. You do an excellent job of writing interesting and informative articles. You had me laughing out loud. I can hardly wait til you write another.

    Have you joined permacultureglobal.com yet? You need a profile on there. You’d probably be one of the most followed projects :-)

  4. Hi Dave – to find all of an author’s posts, please click on the author’s name (see at top of the post, under the title, where it says ‘by Nicola Chatham’).

  5. As soon as I saw your opening photo I recognized you as an Australian writer. I too cope with grease traps and similar problems, but I grew up in the country and all my life have practiced self-sufficiency. You can read my posts about my way of life on https://fayhelwig.com

  6. Hi everyone – thanks for your comments! As always it makes my day to find people are enjoying reading about our (mis-?) adventures.

    Rasp: I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Are you thinking the water flowing down the driveway is due to compacted soil? Do people use a keyline plough on residential land and not just for farming? Our land is converted farmland, but I’m told it was crops and not grazing. Lately in Queensland we’ve had an incredible amount of rain and the ground is simply saturated and quite loose in most areas on our block. Certainly the driveway is compacted for obvious reasons. I would like to hear more about why you suggest the keyline solution.

    A friend, Tom Kenndall (also on the PRI site), did a presentation at Permaculture Noosa last week and showed very good pictures of a problem he’d turned into a solution. His dam overflows in heavy rain and used to pour an enormous amount of water down his property and across his driveway. After some details design work he managed to dig a swale that remained on contour but actually turned a corner, re-directing the water into what is now an enviable, productive banana growing area.

    Ryan: Thanks for your compliments. The next update is on its way!

    Dave: Good luck to you, fellow city kid! It’s a fun journey ~ most of the time :)

    Natasha: thanks so much for your encouragement. I’m planning to put our place on permacultureglobal.com in the near future. I’m glad you find the articles easy to read. I’ve begun looking into doing a journalism course after receiving enthusiastic comments like yours. Thanks!

    Fay: Your poppies look amazing! My mum once saw a painting, I think it was in the War Museum in Canberra, that in a certain light looked like a field of poppies, but once you moved in closer revealed it was actually a field of fallen soldiers. I’ve never forgotten her description. I’m sure you would have some wisdom to share with a novice country dweller like me. I’ll browse your blog – thanks.

    Cecilia: Lovely to hear from you. Yes! I have an exhibition opening in Melbourne on Sat 2 April. Anyone in Melbourne is welcome to attend. The paintings are related to our surrounding landscape and my interpretations of the garden. You can visit https://nicolachatham.com for the exhibition details or send me an email [email protected] and I’ll forward on an invite.

    Happy gardening all!

  7. I too love that Book By Jenny Allen. Who would have thought that wandering about in the rain could be so interesting and rewarding. I also like donning a poncho and weeding in the rain. I enjoy the way you attack each problem with enthusiasm and intelligence.

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