A few years back we had a pipe under the bath spring a leak. It was an old copper pipe which had corroded and over a few days a small pin-leak started squirting the bottom of the iron bath. It got louder and we had to get a plumber in. He had to smash through the external brick wall and replace the pipe.

At the time he said, "There must be something wrong with your water to corrode the pipe like that. You should get it tested."

I did follow up and got the water tested. It was fine. The chap at the testing lab in Wangaratta was kind enough to walk me through the test results, and he finished by saying, "It's great quality water. Better than what we drink here in town."

There are a few quality issues with the build of this house, so I put it down to using cheap or substandard pipe.

But recently I have been thinking about water quality again. We are on a big tank. We have enough roofing to keep it filled almost all the time. Even with the terrible dry 6 months we've had recently, we still never dropped below half full. That's watering us...showers, taps, toilets etc, sheep and cattle. Sometimes I use water for the vegetable garden, but most the summer I pump that water from the river. The tank water tastes great. A former daughter-in-law used to complain about the water, which I pooh-poohed, but I think now she was probably complaining about the water as she received it from the bathroom tap. Which I now know was corroding. SO maybe she was right. But certainly the drinking water from the kitchen tap is fresh and clean tasting.

But tankwater means no chemical additives. You might get more than your fair share of minced mosquito larvae or leaf mulch, but you won't get any fluoride or chlorine. ( We have filters on the pipes to remove the sludge that accumulates in a farm tank. The water that comes out the tap is crystal clear.)

But maybe we need those chemicals.....if I had young children living here I would look into fluoride. It made a huge difference to my generation 's teeth health.

But chlorine? I hate the taste of town water, with chlorine being the chief offender.. Why would I want it in my own water? And at the other end, all our waste water goes into a septic tank. Why would I want sterilizing chemicals messing up my septic fermentation processes.....?

Well....

Recently our dishwasher started not washing properly. The usual crimes were committed, such as not cleaning the filter regularly, and washing plates with greasy smears of meat fat attached.

So I did all that you would normally do, pulled out the filter basket, flushed out the spindle and shook lumps out of it. There's a large wire mesh screen that sieves out big pieces. The underside accumulates fat, and that got cleaned too. The agitator is a small thing, and it draws water through the filter, the mesh screen then pumps it out at pressure through the spindle arms. But there was this weird, jelly-like-but-rubbery tan/brown ....stuff....accumulated inside the agitator. It was sort of glutinous, and I had trouble getting it out. In the end I hooked it with a toothpick, and it slowly pulled it out....it came out as a continuous piece that looked remarkably like a cooked oyster mushroom.

Put it all back together....still didn't wash. This is a long story, I'll make it short. It took me a few goes to realize that there was more than one blockage of the system, but in the end it was all the same fungal goo. But eventually I realized there was more of this stuff still inside the machine. As a last resort I pulled the bottom plate out of the dishwasher. This covers water channels that sit and carry the water from the body of the dishwasher through to the spindle to rev it up and spray the dishes.

Here's what it looked like:

All that brown goo is more mushroom material. It took me a long time to clean every nook and crevice. I figure if I leave any behind it will reseed and start a new colony.

I mostly filled a 1 litre jug with it.

Theoretically it should be edible! After all, everything we wash in the dishwasher comes into contact with it. I have resisted the urge to try frying it up, or perhaps adding it to a Beef Wellington for visitors.

But the water still tastes great.

(I should say, I have tried running some cycles with bi-carb and vinegar, with sodium hydroxide, and with machine-cleaning chemicals and so on. Mushrooms keep on growing.)