unhappy camper

6 months ago we bought a 20 acre place to start our own homestead lifestyle. We have about 120000 litre of rainwater storage and a bore which was going to be used for getting our food forest going. So I planted a small veggie garden and started watering with bore and....everything started to die. So I got the water tested and got the results back today and find that it has an EC value of 14000 from salts.

So she suggest a magnetic water conditioner at $5300 and the only thing the water would be good for is sheep and goats.....still no good for the garden.

I guess the next plan is to look at a dam or maybe some sort of water distillation.

Has anyone built their own water still and if so how did it go?

Distillation is very expensive energy wise . Plus the strong salt solution created corrosive
Where are you and what are your other options
Eg expanding rainwater collection ?deeper well ?
Passive condencing system ?

David

This might provide a bit of inspiration



Basically, you want to use rainwater rather than water pumped up from underground if possible, and you want to reduce evaporation with mulches. You're aiming at making the best use of the water that is available, using swales, soil building techniques, drip irrigation, using the minimum possible so that the the minimum amount of salt is added, and eliminating evaporation so that no salt is deposited on the surface.

yep already started digging swales on contour. Our farm is on top of a small hill and our driveway has a catchment area of about 850 square meters, so I've started planting fruit trees just down from the top and started my swales from there as well as mulching with pea straw. Only issue is there isn't a lot of top soil in places instead it's a bit rocky and I'm digging swales by hand lol.

Anyway back to the water issue. I was thinking solar still. I know bunnings has a unit for 600$ that will make about 20 liters a day. even to get just 200 liters a day that works out to $6k.

I have read quite a bit about solar stills on the net but was curious if anyone here had tried and wanted to share their results.

I'm pulling an old house down this week and collecting all the glass from the windows so am going to build a prototype and see how it works out.

We used a solar still to make distilled water for our solar batteries. We didn't make it as a separate unit, just added collection to a simple solar water heater that we already had. I don't think any kind of still is going to give you amounts of water you can use for growing stuff. If there's any rainfall at all in a year where you are, you can probably get more potable water from a given surface area from rainwater collection than from a still. (That said, I live in place where there's virtually no rainfall and we haven't tried to do rainwater collection here because I think it would be fruitless)

Water really is the key, isn't it? Frustrating situation you are in.

Probably not enough to irrigate but here is an idea.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680613/an-extra-cheap-way-to-get-salt-out-of-water-could-help-make-the-world-less-thirsty