Well we had a massive down pour of hail today. I told the wife " your not going to work till it finishes" boy was it welcome though.

Of course, all the rain that falls on houses and streets in Sydney will go down the drain, literally. What a waste.

If there was a project that all states and territories need to undertake, it is water harvesting. After a deluge, the Parramatta River goes brown for several days because of the water entering from stormwater canals and drains. The waste is even more apaprent up north, where trillions of litres of monsoon rain does pretty much the same thing - falls through the cracks in the ground and disappears instead of being captured, dammed and converted to electricity and irrigation water for crops.

Steady rain is falling here in Steak and Kidney right now.

Actually green garden projects in Sydney are a growing business and many houses now are redirected the drain water from the roof and land run offs.
There was a good article on it only a few days ago on Google news.
I'm going to redirect my down pipe at Albury that's for sure , my yards are nothing but dead grass and dirt.
But I did see dead moss around the base of the trees which tells me it use to be damp at one stage , now you can fit your finger in the cracks on the ground.
The dought is also causing homes to crack in homes that never cracked before . I'm actually in Sydney tonight and it's been pouring rain all day , but Albury missed out and got none , hmmmm same old story.
Pete

You may not want to be in Albury if its anything like it is at the moment here. Around eight the wind brought in a massive front of smoke & the visibility dropped to around 300m in minutes.

The wind changed to SE and the Pyro Cumulus cloud above Mt Buffalo collapsed, which is where most of the smoke originated from. That lead to the normal totally unpredictable winds in the fire area. The fire is largely out of control & was heading north spotting ahead.

If the soils cracking then it is likely very high in clay or compounded. Might be worth doing a soil pH but it may need the addition of lots of Gypsum & perhaps organic matter to try & turn it into usable soil & the rotary hoe treatment.

There was a front went through a couple of days ago that yielded nothing here, however the spring in the spring fed dam is now running, so after the effluxion of around four days, it should rain. So possibly late Sat & Sunday into Monday?

Fascinating dam that one it did the same thing from bone dry (we cleaned it with a D7) 1982 drought. Started filling four days before the first rain.

Marc

Pete, using run off water is a hot topic.
In the Blue Mountains new homes have diverter valves in roof run offs and piped to storage tanks as a matter of course. Our home in Springwood had to have certain size water storage tanks, and a petrol driven water pump and fire hose as a part of the house build.
Back in Toongabbie in Sydney I have diverter valves and one in the laundry sink so the washing machine water can be piped direct to the ground out of a wander pipe. I'll go along with using grey water to keep the grass and geraniums alive but will not have a bar of waste water going near the vegetable gardens. I don't like a closed cycle water system letting pathogens entering my mouth via the food. We are not on Mars! Yet. Human waste and shower water goes down the sewerage pipes as a open loop system. Sure it does get back to us via the rain, but after Moher Nature filters it, we hope.

I note new houses in Toongabbie must have ground run off retention tanks as part of the build, but no grey water systems required, possibly because all the town is old build from the 1940's and probably too hard to put the whole system in. The ground tanks I believe are there to slow down the run off to the creeks via the street drainage system. That was introduced way back and we have not had a torrential rain flood of the local creek since that system was introduced, along with a lot of pond work in the creeks as well.
The local government and councils do all sorts of work most residents don't know about with drainage and storm water control.
Yes, despite what that idiot scientist said and the crap the thunderburg girly types go on with we do get cloud bursts every year and we used to get local flooding every couple of years in the 1960's. Now it can flood down for a couple of hours like it did a couple of months ago and it just holds and drains away.

On those scientists and stupid girls: what do they want? The friggin planet covered in ice again? Then they would have something to winge about! Of course the planet is warming up and thank goodness for that! Some people should read a bit of planet history and how things work. The unlocking of frozen water ways and unproductive landin the Northern Hemisphere is a good thing.
All we need to do is to stop people trying to grow food and animals in the middle of desert area like they are doing now in Australia and shift production to the bits of the island where it always rains. And, build that system of pipes and pumps that Bradfield designed to run water from the North of the island to the dry bits down South and STOP WHINING!

There you go, I feel much better now.
Fred.

At Windella, we have town water but no town sewerage so all our waste water is treated on site. The effluent is chlorinated and fed to 500 square metres of drip pipes under mulch, keeping shrubs alive, (no vegies, just in case).
All our roof water goes to tanks for other garden use and as of yesterday, we were down to 1/4 capacity, so the 17mm we have had since yesterday morning is very welcome.
Harold

Just minutes ago I read a report in The Weekend Australian that described a recent storm in Brisbane as a "life threatening supercell" and the rain fall was 145mm - around 6 inches on the old scale. Two years ago, a storm his Sydney's lower north shore, where I live and work. That afternoon we copped 205mm, around 8 inches. This event was described at the time by its more correct title - "an east coast low".

We've gone from the catastrophic apocolypse of bushfire to a life threatening supercell. This is why the mainstream media is now almost constantly scoffed at, with their silly emotional descriptions of events that take place on a regular basis. Yes, the fires have been bad and yes, it's not funny having one's roof fall in under the weight of so much water but if the media could return to their role of reporting the news instead of negatively typifying everything they report, the paper would be much more worth the purchase price.

Beware of grey water: It can kill plants. What is not appreciated is that washing powder contains a lot of stuff like Soda Ash (Sodium Carbonate) which buffers it to often over pH eight. That can do as much damage as acid soil.

That means that every so often you need to get a soil sample from around 50mm down and check its pH. If it is going to alkaline then you are going to need Sulphate of Ammonia to drag it back down. pH7 is neutral.

Not all plants like Acid soil & lots don't like it too alkaline.

Marc

> "Just minutes ago I read a report in The Weekend Australian"

Well, there's your first problem...

> "that described a recent storm in Brisbane as a "life threatening supercell""

So here's the backstory on that: about a decade or so ago, a guy called Jeff Higgins started up a Facebook group & YouTube channel called "Higgins Storm Chasing". A relentless self-promoter given to filling every media inbox with his outlandish fearmongering, he soon became locally famous for (a) being the go-to non-BoM source for weather in SE Qld, (b) his speech impediment, and (c) calling every storm a "thuperthell!", every bit of rain being a "thuperthell forming!", and clouds "potential thuperthells!".

Basically, he's a long-running local joke. Channel 7 locally used to heavily lean on him for their weather coverage, though I think even they have mostly given up on him. If The Australian is quoting him, it's most likely because the person given the job of writing a story about weather in SE Qld found his emails at the top of their inbox. Basically, it's more a sad indictment on the quality of 'journalism' in The Australian than a sign of anything else.

Marcc,
The grey water out of our system is chlorinated and the pH is monitored regularly, it has been on 6.8 for the last several months. Our main problem is the distribution over the transpiration area, too much water has drowned a couple of plants in the past.
Harold

With mainstream media it's always a race to the bottom. I note that in the last 6 months or so ABC News Online has taken a page out of the News Corp tabloid trash copybook when it comes to headlines and writing style. I will not be surprised to see a headline like Transgender Teacher Stuns in Bombshell Bikini on the ABC site in future.

Yeh! realise the problem. I am rural so provided there is not too much pump blocking crap you can drop it into a small pit & pump it all over the place. That cheap irrigation poly is good for around 20 psi but if the pipe is open ended that does not apply.

The workshop swampy air cons dump water actually drops into a 130 litre keg. It can dump more than that keg full in a day and that's water one cannot afford to lose. So it has a sump pump to send it to a holding tank that can be treated. I have had the comment that fluoride strengthens the teeth of cut worms that destroy the garden. So I can see some of the issues with the poisons in town water.

I'm waiting for one of the ABC promoters of climate change to put forward the proposition that it was farting dinosaurs, that individually produced enough methane to run a factory for weeks, that caused so much global warming it ended the last "Ice Age".

Listening to Sky & The ABC is like listening to VOA & Radio Moscow in the "Cold War": Which one was telling the truth or stretching it? Either or either; neither, or neither.