Let’s look at the second activity of water harvesting, storing rainwater for later use.
This one’s tailor-made for backyard food production, especially if you have a cistern. However, cisterns have limited capacity, so you’ll need to carefully allocate that water within your growing space.
Transcript
INTRO: From Tucson, Arizona, welcome to the Water Harvesting 101 podcast. My name is Martha Retallick. I’ve been a water harvester for 20 years, and I’m looking forward to helping you get started.
Before we do that, here’s a little Tucson secret: For most of the year, we’re in drought. That’s just how life is in the desert.
But when the rains return, oh, do they ever. They often bring an unwelcome friend called flooding.
How do we reduce the risks of flooding? We do it with water harvesting.
Water harvesting encompasses three activities:
- Redirecting rainwater away from where it isn’t wanted to where it is.
- Storing rainwater for later use, for example, during a drought.
- Recycling “used” water. At my place, I don’t let laundry water go down the drain. Instead, it’s for the fruit trees.
We’ll be covering all of these topics and more, so let’s get started.
EPISODE: Welcome to the second part of a three-part series on growing your own food with water harvesting.
Last week, I talked about the first activity of water harvesting, which is redirecting rainwater away from where you don’t want it to where you do.
The conclusion was, yeah, you can kinda-sorta of grow your own food that way, but there’s a more direct way of doing it. That’s what I’m going to talk about this week, storing rainwater for later use.
Now, at my place, there is a 1,500 gallon cistern, and yesterday I did the little knock-knock test up the side. You know where you go KNOCK-KNOCK, and that’s where there’s water. Then as you get higher up on the cistern, you go knock-knock, no water there.
Right now I’m at 1,250 gallons of water, and there is rain in the forecast for the next few days. So, here’s hoping that the cistern fills back up again.
Now, what will I be doing with that 1,500 gallons once the cistern gets filled up? Well, I have three raised bed gardens which have a total of 36 square feet for growing.
I don’t often use the cistern water for watering my landscape plants, although I did it yesterday. I just had an Arizona rosewood and two desert hackberries planted by Trees for Tucson.
I needed to get them off to a good start so that Trees for Tucson told me 10 gallons per plant. So I was really busy with the watering can yesterday morning and that drained the cistern down even further.
Normally, I would be horrified about doing such a thing. I want to ration that cistern water.
But since we do expect rain in the next couple of days, I’d like that water level to go a little bit lower than usual.
In case we get a lot of rain, the cistern doesn’t overflow very often.
I do have a cistern overflow basin in the backyard, but that overflow basin also gets water from… redirecting rain away from where you don’t want it to where you do!
My cistern overflow basin is a low spot — and basins fill up when it rains. So I’ll have that to watch out for rainwater overflowing from the basin.
A note about what I’m growing in my fall/winter garden: I still have the tepary beans from summer, although I’m harvesting the beans and I’m about ready to pull the plants.
I’m also growing garlic, lettuce, and greens, and I just planted snow peas.
Snow peas are vining plants, just like the tepary beans, and I have little trellises for them. I’m expecting to have a pretty good crop this winter.
Matter of fact, it’s about time to start harvesting some of my fall/winter crops. Why? Because of the cooler weather and rain we’ve been experiencing — things are really growing!
I mentioned previously that we’re expecting rain in the next couple of days and I am hoping to be able to provide you with a treat: That is, a recording of the rain.
And let’s go inside baseball for a minute. How do I do that? Well, I know from a past episode, that recording an episode during a rainstorm — in this studio — just doesn’t pick up a very strong rain sound.
In order to get the good stuff, like that thunderclap at the intro in this podcast, I have to go outside in the rainstorm with my phone and do a little recording.
So, here’s hoping that that happens in the next couple of days. If it does, you will hear it right at the very end of this podcast.
[ Indeed you will! There’s a slight shower at the end of the podcast. ]
OUTRO: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Water Harvesting 101 podcast. If you’d like to learn more about water harvesting, meet my book family.
First, it’s City Nature, the book that’s guaranteed to look great on any coffee table. City Nature reveals my secrets to water harvesting through my 20-year journey of transforming my Tucson home into an urban oasis. Get the details at CityNatureBook.com.
And if you’re on the go, take water harvesting with you. Water Harvesting 101 is an audiobook and eBook combination that will teach you the nuts and bolts of water harvesting and show you how to put them to work. Available exclusively at WaterHarvesting101Book.com.