Collecting Water
When growing outside, the biggest limiting factor will be water. Rich, loamy soil has good drainage, holds moisture well, but will dry out. Cultivated plants require much more water than wild flora so your plants need watering, constantly. Nearly every municipality allows for rainwater capture. Only places were rainfall is scare or prone to drought are there restrictions for collecting rain.
You can use pretty much anything to capture water in, and the amount you capture is easy to calculate. For every 1 inch of rain that falls, 1 square foot collects .6 gallons, give or take some for splash out and evaporation. So if it’s a bunch of buckets or a roof, if you have 1 square foot of surface area, you can get pretty much .6 gallons for every inch of rainfall.
Our first capture system was around 6 square feet. It captured 3.6 gallons per inch of rain and dumped it into a 35 gallon can. Quite a success for a first run. It didnt capture enough water, so we brought in hundreds of gallons of water. The solution: bigger rain catcher.
The next year, we made our capture area a little bigger and more durable. It had about 15 square feet of surface area and emptied into a 55-gallon drum. On paper, we should get 9 gallons per inch. The flaws in the design were that the plastic was too flimsy and would blow around so not as much water would make it in. Getting the water out was a huge pain because all we had was a hand pump. After about 40 or so pulls, it becomes not so much fun. 55 gallons is also not enough water, period.
That year, we had to haul water in the only things we had available, the 35-gallon cans. Of course, we can’t fill the cans all the way up. I mean, we could, but that would be just BEGGING for trouble. Its not the best solution, but its faster than other methods and with how the garden has scaled, speed is definately something to be considered.
We acquired some more rain barrels, which made it much easier to transport water around, and because they only have two small holes at the top, much less splashing happens during transport. We still have to syphon the water out with the help of gravity. Again, not ideal, but better than what we had going on before.
The following year, we took what we learned, both from our successes and failures, and came up with another system. A stiff piece of plastic sheeting with 18 square feet of surface area leading into a 275 gallon IBC tote. Every inch of rain we get, we take in more than 10 gallons. Granted, it would take a couple feet of rain to fill the buffalo and we are not going to get that, but the ability to store this much water is a HUGE help.
We got more rain barrels, some heavy, duty hose, a 1 HP sprinkler pump, and a generator. We can now move over 200 gallons and water the plants in less than half the time it took us to do it by hand. The biggest pain now is moving the generator and priming the pump. Oh, and 100 feet of hose is unwieldy, to say the least. Ideally, we wish to set up an automatic irrigation system where every plant gets its own feed so all we have to do is flip a switch and monitor. For now, this is how we do it and it works pretty well. Next year, we’ll install another rain catcher of the same size to double our capture amount from 10 gallons to 20+. If each plant gets a half gallon of water, that’s 40 plants we can take care of. Each plot has a little over 100 plants, and right now we have 2 plots…you see how things can really add up.
