Fickle Arizona Weather

Well our weather has certainly been crazy this year. Yes I know I'm not the only one, I'm seeing this from gardeners all around the world.

The back garden on Sat. March 17, 2012

Saturday was a very nice day for working out in the yard and getting things done. Then the rain started. Actually that was a very good thing. It filled up the water tanks, so now I have a little over 400 gallons reserve again. In the past couple of days we've gotten 1.6" so I'm not complaining about that.

Early Sunday morning the rain turned to snow and we had some hard hail. The rain has been alternating with snow ever since. Although we did have some bits of pretty blue sky today, they were short lived.

Back garden under snow, March 19, 2012

Of course such wild temperature and weather swings are very hard on the plants. I have a feeling that the Mammoth Melting Snow peas might not make it. They just had their first blossom on Saturday, too.  It's been about 36 degrees all day today. But it's supposed to be back up into the 70's by Thursday.

Rain Water Catchment

My Water tanks

I live in a pretty small house by modern standards, only about 900 square feet, give or take a few. At the moment I only have about one third of my roof guttered to catch rain water. Even though the joints on the gutter leak and one of my tanks has sprung a leak, I still managed to catch 300 gallons of water from about 3 inches of rain.

When I have my whole house guttered and all the leaks plugged, I should be able to harvest about 450 gallons of water for every inch of rain that falls. In that case the three inches of rain that has fallen this month would have garnered me 1350 gallons of water! The next problem of course is enough tank capacity to hold that water until I really need it in May, June and July. Right now I'm using whatever I can get but when I plan my future home I'm thinking of building a cistern big enough to hold several thousand gallons of water and maybe even create extra roof space like covered porches to collect extra water. (Around here, as long as they are not closed in, covered porches aren't counted for property tax value, we are calculated strictly on square footage of enclosed living space).

I've just finished an article with some great resources about rainwater harvesting, called Rainwater Catchment.

More Snow & the Water Tanks

snowy footprints

I had to be to work at 6 this morning and it began snowing on my way in. In a couple of hours it was coming down fast and hard, in huge flakes. By noon there was about 3-4 inches of snow on the top of my car. About 1:00 the sun came out and where ever it was shining the snow melted, but not anywhere else.

The garden is hiding under the snow

The garden still has a fair amount of unmelted snow on the beds. This time of year it doesn't get much sun after 2:00 and none at all after 3:00.

Rain water catchement

On another note, on Sunday I went out to discover that the smaller of my water tanks was full and also leaking underneath. It got blown off it's support during the July 4th storm (I know it's Dec and I'm still talking about that !@#@ storm!) so I suppose that is when it got a crack in it's bottom. That explains why it was empty the rest of the monsoon season. I thought it was because the gutters were messed up and leaking.

Well, I went and hauled the big square tank down into the yard and then I went through the junk and found an old fountain pump. mmmm need a piece of tubing for the pump, nothing handy on the porch or in the yard. Check the falling down shed. Sure enough found a piece of tubing that fits the outlet on the pump and oh goody, it is long enough to go from one tank to the other! YAY! So I pumped all the water out of the fiberglass tank into the bigger one. Got some more this afternoon. When the weather warms up I'll have to get a fiberglass patch kit and patch up the crack. In the meantime as long as it rains faster than the tank leaks and I'm home to turn on the pump I can at least get some of the rain water. The big square tank holds about 250 gallons and the fiberglass one about 150. Now I just need to buy some more tanks and finish getting gutters on the house!