One of the most powerful concepts in permaculture for me is ‘keep the water high’. All water stored high in the landscape is potential energy, thanks in part to gravity. If your water is high, you can make that water available to everything below it in the landscape, via gravity feed and piping, with no energy spent on pumps. At all. Which makes for one resilient landscape.
So when it came to designing the rainwater harvesting for our drinking water at Milkwood Farm, we knew we wanted to store the water high. This way, if we didn’t have power for some reason, we would still have drinking water at our house, because we wouldn’t be relying on a pump to deliver the water to us. But we aren’t building our home on top of the hill – so how to get the water up there? Read More
