Pedal on, brotha, pedal on

In the Austin American Statesman today:

New meaning to the water cycle

Some of us bike to work, some of us bike for exercise, some of us bike for the pure joy of peddling. Larry Gilg bikes to water his vegetable garden.

Gilg, an electrical engineer who lives in Hyde Park, rigged up a stationary bicycle trainer — the kind most people buy so they can ride indoors when it's raining outside — to a pump that links a bank of rainwater collection barrels to a water sprinkler.

The longtime cyclist got the idea while riding past a gym on his way to Barton Springs for his morning swim. "All those people riding bikes — they ought to be doing something with all that energy," he thought.

He figures he can generate about a third of a horsepower on his bike. That's plenty to move water from his 27 water-collecting, 55-gallon barrels to his three garden plots.

He pedals about 30 minutes every morning. "It's a good workout," he says. "Then I get all the fresh veggies to eat — tomatoes, cucumbers, beans."

He usually brings a book or magazine along to read while he pedals. It's harder to pedal on the trainer than to ride it around town, he says, because there's more consistent resistance. "It's like you're always going uphill," Gilg says.

The set-up is part of Gilg's plan to eventually get off the utilities grid. "I like to think of myself as a producer, not a consumer. I think people in this country really need to think about that."

Two questions:

1. Do you really think he waters from the table? Was that perhaps just for photographic purposes? Should everybody be hauling a table to their front yard when they water?
2. How is he not in the line of fire? From my calculations, he should be soaked already.
   

Those crazy engineers. What will he think of next? It'll be a stroke of genius, I'm sure.

Heck, if I actually watered my lawn, I'd probably give him a call.