Gray water.

[Admin]

For the last several years I have been discharging my gray water into dry well but the ground here doesn't drain very good and it's become saturated. I was looking at the front of my house this morning and got to thinking about building a cold frame against the skirting on the south side. My house is on piers and the cold frame would serve many purposes. I could have a window behind it to allow light from the cold frame to pass under the house and illuminate that crawl space, also allow air to circulate under there as well. The cold frame itself would be used to start plants as they are intended.

This cold frame would be directly in front of my kitchen sink and I'm wondering if I let my sink discharge into the cold frame, it would possibly eliminate my ground saturation problem That area of ground is built up about 3' high and within a retaining wall. The excess water would evaporate fairly quick and also water the plants in the box.

The kitchen sink is directly behind the 3 windows in the gable and the cold frame would cover the skirting below it. This is the south side of the house. This pic was take right after I completed my stone wall project and is now completely back filled and is the ol lady's flower garden.



Everything sounds like a good idea to me but my question is this...

Do you think the gray water would be harmful in any way to vegetable plants? We don't use any excessively harsh cleaning agents in the sink. There's dish soap of course and some lysol disinfectant crap the ol lady uses occasionally. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think feeding vegetables sink discharge would be a bad idea?

Thank ya kindly

[woodsman416]

It's a great idea for everything but root vegetables. I was reading up on it this past year in reference to a project I'll be doing next Spring. Here's a link I have saved for info on this.
www.graywatergardening.com/Fruit___Vegetables.html

[Admin]

Interesting stuff Ken. thank you.

I was thinking that if I did indeed do this that I would eliminate any harmful cleaning agents beyond dish soap as most home remedies for garden pest contain dish soap in a spray bottle. I was thinking that there would be bacteria due to the decaying food matter but that would be decaying IN the garden mush like our the compost we all use. I wonder why it is ok and even benificial for us to dump buckets of rotting and rotted food matter in our gardens but sending them through a pipe is different.

Interesting topic.

[rhyla]

I was planning on doing a similar thing when we build our next house. Grey water was gonna go out to the garden. Make sense. Why waste more extra water for plants than need be.

[patricimo54]

I have the water discharge from our clothes washer running out by our fruit trees. I had thought about various points of discharging gray water for our Arkansas property. Thanks Ken for posting the link

[Admin]

I read a bunch of the stuff on the link that W416 provided and I can see a bacteria issue if I was planning to pump the goop up from my dry well tank. Now that would be just plain gross.

But running the dicharge line directly from my sink, it would be about a 6' run from the sink to the garden. Sink water and food particles. How would that be considered worse than all the rotting vegetation in my compost bin? I would think that there would be more bacteria in that bin than in my sink and we encourage composting.
So I'm confused a bit.

All root vegetables such as taters and carrots contain bacteria and are recommended to cook before eating, so there's bacteria in our normal gardens anyway. I DO have to say that growing "cookable" vegetables in the sink discharge does sound more appealing than raw ones like lettuce.

[ninedeer]

the grey water form my kitchen sink has been going into my garden for long time.hasnt been a problem that I can tell.

[barkspud]

Thats a good link woodsman..I like the though of what your trying to do jc and don't see why you couldn't. Dosn't the heat the compost generate kill the bacteria . Very interesting for sure got my wheels turning.

[stickbowhntr]

Hey barkspud,"got my wheels turning"...or is that spinning??? ;D

[rhyla]

I think you might be right about that barkspud