My first homesteader concept had to be the collection of rainwater. It was a valuable natural resource for our new lifestyle and it was free.
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Being raised a city girl for most of my life, I longed for country living. It was an attractive dream and we finally settled on our country home.
The revelation of collecting and using my own rainwater was far more frightening than I imagined it to be just because of the things we didn’t know.
Many years later and no longer a novice I am grateful for the experience.
It taught me a valuable lesson about the possible pollutants that can be in a water source. A decade of leaves and bark falling into a rainwater tank had a very undesirable result.
As I discovered, rainwater quality can be good but can go horribly wrong if attention to the detail is not applied.
With water quality and scarcity on my mind, we decided to put our best foot forward. We were driven to protect our water source as only someone with no other option was.
We cut down the offending trees covering the water tanks, gave our best efforts at cleaning them and finally installed a quality water filtration system to the house.
A long time ago I read somewhere that homesteading is much about preserving and conserving. I have been driven to the conclusion that preserving rainwater has so much more to do with solid science than pure chance.
- Tracy Brussow
