Time

Well, I've obviously filled up all my available time allotted for working each day. Filled it up so completely that I no longer have time to blog. Not good. Changes will have to be made. The time has come to incorporate some equipment, tools, and new systems that my mother so proudly loved and called "time savers". Part of being successful in life, as far as she as concerned, was having the latest and greatest time savers in her home. 

I've been looking over my daily routine and seeing where I could make some adjustments, perhaps adding a timesaver or two. One task, making Mom's Famous Slop & Glop, has some promise. One solution -- I could cut out making my own livestock food altogether and switch to strictly commercial feed. That would free up a significant chunk of time. That's one option, but not one that is appealing to me at this time. Another is to somehow quicken the process. The bottle neck in the process seems to be grinding the feedstock. Currently I'm using a blender, which of course only holds a small portion at a time. I think switching to using an old kitchen garbage disposal for grinding could cut a major chunk of time off the process. I know where I can get one real cheap, in fact I'll can trade a few buckets of vegetables for it. So this is going to be a project I'll focus on this coming week. 

Another task where I can see I could save time is in watering the various gardens. Right now I hand fill large jugs with water from the irrigation catchment tank, transport them to the gardens via the ATV, then hand water the garden beds. This method worked well when I only had a few gardens but I've been constantly expanding. Now I'm too big for the hand method. But I'm not productive nor big enough to justify installing a large pump (remember, I'm on limited solar power) along with an extensive irrigation system. Going with a gasoline powered pump doesn't make sense to me at this point. Nor is buying a portable generator economically sensible. Plus my growing beds are scattered, incorporated into the landscaping and terrain. There is no central garden. Hoses or pipes would have to go every direction. But I do have the capability of transporting a half ton of water in my pickup truck. So I'm thinking along the lines of transporting a large volume of water then using a DC transfer pump to water the various gardens. I could drive all the the water I need directly to the gardens, then run the pump off a couple of deep cycle batteries. I already have the batteries available, and a used transfer pump that I rebuilt and now works fine. So I plan to give this idea a trial run and see how much time it saves me. 

Another area where I believe I'm using too much time is my greywater use. Presently the kitchen sink and clothes washer drain into trashcans, whereupon I bucket the water out and water banana trees, flower beds, fruit trees. This system is another big time user. I need to design a simple system for the kitchen sink so that the water can be self delivering to either the banana trees or the orchard trees. The sink doesn't generate a lot of waste water, so it shouldn't overburden the trees if all the water goes directly to the them. The clothes washer generates a lot of greywater, more than I want to be going directly to trees and flower beds all the time. So a simple storage arrangement needs to be set up and delivery system needs to be made. I already have an assortment of supplies for making such a system, but I'll need some hose connectors, values, and perhaps another hose or two. If I'm successful in creating a greywater irrigation system for the wash machine, it will save me a good chunk of time. 

So the plan is to focus on setting up time saving projects and see how that helps my problem of not enough time.