Getting the Garden Wet, Then and Now
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We get plenty of sun, lots of great soil, few weeds, barely any pests, what else could we need? In this instance, and for larger farms, its 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.
2018 was the first year we had a garden that didn’t have water available on site.
We started out in 2018 transporting all the water ourselves in whatever containers we could. This method DID work and had its advantages.
- Containers were essentially free
- Easy to acquire
- Food safe
- Water tight
- Easy to track how much each plant gets
For all of its good points, it wasn’t ideal for a list of reasons.
- Takes a long time to fill and not easy to do with a hose
- Cap removal, keeping track of, and recapping is a pain
- Requires lots of trips to bring bottles to plants and return them back to the vehicle
- Storing containers looks like you’re hoarding trash
To supplement the transporting, we set up a rain barrel with a catcher above it. Our rain catcher was a couple of old feed bags and could capture about 2.7 gallons per half inch of rain. It was a very wet year, so it worked out great, but the catcher didn’t stand up to the sun and disintegrated by the end of summer.
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.
2019 is the year we doubled our plot size and thus, doubled our water needs.
The next year, we upgraded from 35 gallon cans to 55 gallon barrels. The rain catchers were made with 6 mil plastic sheeting that we were able to reuse for another project, and they captured twice as much rain. The holes were smaller and difficult to work with and missed out on a lot of water. To extract the captured water, we opted for a hand pump. Though reliable, it’s slow and a real workout to use, especially when you’re pumping around 100 gallons and only pouring a quart per pull. Another thing that stood out, is the wooden poles we purchased ended up becoming brittle and breaking by the end of the season. The bamboo sustained no damage.
2020’s system should satisfy our needs for the next few seasons and beyond.
We took what we learned, both from our successes and failures, and came up with another improvement. 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.
Fun fact: these totes originally contained food-grade glycerin from Malaysia and weigh around 45 lbs, empty. Filling them to their capacity brings the weight to over a ton. Thanks to the 18 square foot 1/16″ plastic rain catchers, they can pull in over 10 gallons per half inch of rain, each. Two days after we set them up, we got hit with a nice thunderstorm and harvested around 70 gallons. The hand pump, technically did work, but it was awful and there is no way we are going to use one of those for the cubes. Which takes us to our next upgrades.
We invested in a 2500 Watt Ford generator and a 1 horsepower Superior sprinkler pump *. We can now move close to 1000 gallons per hour thanks to this combo. What took 2 hours can now be done in 45 minutes. That doesn’t mean watering still isn’t a lot of work. The generator with an empty tank weighs over 100 lbs and we’re still moving barrels of water.
We put up bamboo posts to snake the hose around and not worry about pulling over any of our plants. Also, when the wind blows, it makes a haunting whistling sound. 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+.
* we had to switch to a Wayne 1 HP sprinkler pump because the first one failed after a month of sporadic use**.
** the on/off switch broke early this season but was still under the manufacture’s warrantee and they expedited a replacement so we wouldn’t be without one for long.
