Kitchen Garden Forum

Can anybody help? I was all geared up to get water out of the bath down to water butts and thence o the veg garden and then somebody told me it would mess up the soil's surface tension so we shouldn't use it.
Can anybody advise please?
And please don't suggest we take showers - none of us likes them and we all share 1 shallow bath (sequentially!) which uses less water than 3 showers.

Sounds like horse manure to me. When I lived in a proper house with a bath I used bath water all the time and noticed no problems. Having said that we always used biodegradeable 'natural' bath products, and of course didn't use it on food to be eaten raw like lettuce, due to the pathogens that may be present.

To stop lugging the water through the house we put a rain diverter on the waste pipe from the bath room into a butt. Drain off what you haven't used daily to stop bugs breeding (and pongs developing). Of course this only works if your bathroom is upstairs, and you have a suitable waste pipe (ie the bath doesn't go into your sewage fall pipe).

I thought I didn't like showers but now they have been forced on me I quite like them - much quicker. But I would occasionally like a long soak.

the potential problems come from what u put in the bathwater. highly coloured soaps , bubbles etc all contain toxic chemicals. most of the time we dont even use soap so have no qualms about reusing the water.

Hey thanks guys, that's great!
We tend to use pretty much natural products and not too much of them so I think I will proceed. I plan to siphon the water from the (upstairs) bathroom to a holding tank and then use gravity to get it up the garden to a series of water butts from which I plan to run seepage hoses....at least that's the theory!

Hadn't thought of the pathogen issue - good point though!

I'll let you know how I do...

Thanks again,

PJ