Anti-Septic

Another week has flown by during which we received some not so good news. It appears that the septic system in the Milk Barn, while actually collecting and dispatching effluent to the tank in the vegetable garden as it should, lacks one major component - a drain field. The upshot? We need to have a drain field layed out and then buried in the garden somewhere, and not just anywhere. It has to be somewhere that gravity can feed it as well as complying with all the rules and regulations the County and the State want to throw at us (including set distances from things like boundaries, fencelines, wells and swales).

So, considering the tank is old, concrete, and probably cracked somewhere (after all that water has to be going somewhere right?) we are going to get a new tank installed at the same time as the drain field is done. This way we can comply with the ODA regarding whey disposal as well as regular effluent.

There is some good news though, it seems we can bury the drain field in the end of the vegetable garden in the 'orchard'. More bad news is that the ballpark cost is $7,500 - $15,000 depending on what needs doing. The higher amount is a worse case scenario that involves pumps and a non-gravity system, the lower amount is if no additional work needs doing other than a straight install. Once its done though, the rest of the renovation will be the easy part as we'll have water and septic and of course the new roof. I can hear the bank account sighing at last.

Today is a lovely day to cap off the week, 88 degrees at the moment (29C for those of you on metric) and we've spent the day roto-tilling the vegetable garden, planting potatos, and mowing, and I got a tan to boot! During the week its been all go, water blasting the barn area and moving manure.

It also appears that our 24 sheep from Vermont Shepherd will be arriving a lot sooner than we had expected, the end of this month to be exact. In order to reduce the size of the flock then over the next couple of weeks we'll be retiring some of the sheep and filling the freezer with.....well, meat.