Since we grow off grid at our home, rain water catchment is a critical aspect of our gardening efforts. So, let’s talk about what we do.
We have what we’d call “full” rain water catchment. All of our gutters are routed into individual rain barrels, basically converted 32 gallon Rubbermaid trash cans. In our early days, we messed around with diverters, but those suck and lose way too much water. So, we had our gutter guys craft us “summer mode” and “winter mode” downspouts. The summer version directs 100% of our rainwater to our barrels, where our winter version is a more traditional downspout.
Each barrel features two hose bibs and we really like this. The bottom one is attached to a short hose, allowing us localized watering needs. The top outlet is connected to irrigation piping, allowing gravity to pull the rainwater back to a centralized tank. The key here is that our centralized barrel lies physically below each of our four rain barrels so gravity can do its job.
The reason we have both barrels and a tank is because is because we live in a subarctic desert. We do get rainfall, but the bulk of our rainfall comes at us hard and fast during thunderstorms and infrequent, large storms. Having the barrel allows us to capture many gallons of water without any loss, since our piping limits how fast we can pipe water back to our central tank. We also have cheap nets over each barrel that both filters the rainwater and eliminates mosquito breeding.
Our centralized tank is a large 375 gallon Greer tank. We’d much prefer a black tank, to eliminate algae growth, but we got a screaming deal on this one. We’d also prefer a 1,000+ gallon tank, too, as we can certainly capture more water with the right equipment. (Some day!)
We use a pressure activated pump from this central tank to move water around our property, into our irrigation systems or even just a regular hose end sprayer. It basically allows us to treat this system not unlike a pressurized home water system. For our irrigation, we have a low tech “zone controller” using a 4-way hose splitter, allowing us to establish four separate irrigation zones.
None of our system is “permanently” installed, as in buried underground. The ice and frost heaving we get in the winter is quite the threat to buried piping, so we heavily rely on above ground irrigation tubing and “summer mode” garden hoses to make our necessary physical connections. This largely saves us from expensive repairs as everything remains serviceable.
This system is imperative to growing at our home! Without it, gardening would simply be too expensive here. We also have ways to fill it less expensively, too, in the event it doesn’t rain. But, that’s a topic for another day!
