Can We Talk About Gray Water?

We have a gray water ditch.  Pretty old school.  It means that all of the water from our kitchen sink and washing machine drains to a little ditch that is only about 40 feet from our back door.  Why?  I don't know, maybe because that water would be bad for the septic?  Whatever.  But I am a city girl and when I first found out about the gray water area it made me a bit nauseous.  So this is a story about turning lemons into gray lemonade.

I can't tell you how careful we are about what we put down our kitchen drain now.  We don't want to use any soaps that would hurt the environment (or the ugly frog that lives in the gray water pipe.)

We wash all of our dishes in the kitchen sink, so any little speck of veg left on our plates we would see again in the gray water ditch (slight wretch here). We are very careful about scraping off every little speck.

Since the area stays damp I can grow flag iris which I was never able to grow before.  We just planted these iris last year and they are already blooming. And our chickens love the area because there is always little bugs flying around -- fortunately they haven't discovered the ugly frog yet.

So that disgusting gray water ditch?  One of the loveliest places on our property!