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.

Tally HO! April 3, 2009

Tally HO!

April 3, 2009 at 3:29 am 

I have joined up for Million Pound challenge, that is growing a million pounds of produce collectively, see www.freedomgardens.org for more information. Marche’s tally was 17.859 pounds of veggies, mostly mache, claytonia, kale, chard, chickweed, with a few carrots, beets and peas. Also 126 chicken eggs. whew, that’s a lot of eggs!

Check out these little baby plums, mmm can’t wait for them to get big and juicy!

who says veggies aren’t beautiful?! The pea flowers on the left are Dwarf Grey Sugar peas [like the flat pea pods in Chinese food] and the ones on the right are Blueshokkers, an heirloom blue/purple shelling pea, usually dried and used for soup I understand. This is my first time growing the shellers, so we’ll see!

Under the lights, in 3/4″ soil blocks are eggplant and pepper seedlings. The group of eggplant seedlings in the back look like they have all germinated and are ready to move up into 2″ soil blocks. Soil blocks are pretty cool, you use a little tool to scoop up a peat & compost mix and press it into blocks, complete with indention in the top to take seeds. The 2″ blocks can be made with a hole that just takes the 3/4″ block, so ‘potting on’ is really easy, with no shock to the little plant.

Here are some of those 70 some tomato plants that have been transplanted to larger pots and recycled containers. Yes, there are a couple of old ice chests and some plastic storage boxes that I’ve made into self watering containers as an experiment. Since we only get 12-18 inches of rain a year, and have been in a long term drought, anything to save water is good.