I said to my wife the other day that it feels like it's been raining for 40 days and 40 nights now. So, at times like this it's sometimes hard to think about the possible dry times ahead and storing water for use around the homestead. But as always it's best to be prepared, especially with some of the summer we've had lately.
We have a number of ways of collecting water. Most are cobbled together from a time when we were on a very tight budget. I have always dreamed of installing some much larger water tanks which would mean I could dispense with some of the maintenance that goes with having linked storage barrels. The one lot are filled from the roof of my workshop, although I could easily add gutter and more barrels to the other side as well.
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| A bit of green growth around the fittings - tell tale signs it's leaking. |
Last summer was case in point of this, where I had both sets of linked barrels leak. The barrels in question are old olive barrels, bought cheap. I try to make sure I never have more than 4 barrels linked up in a series. This is then is about a thousand litres, The row of 6 (in the picture above) is linked as two lots of three, with a filling pipe placed at the top to link them up. That way if one leaks it won't drain the whole lot so we're not left without water when we need it most.
The problem from these barrels comes from the fact that they are very curved on the inside, so any fitting I use is a bit of a bodge, using silicone. The other problem comes from the top of the barrels not accepting my broad shoulders, so every time we've added some of these to the homestead, one of the children has had to go inside to hold the spanner to tighten the fitting!
It's worth fixing these leaks now though, while there is plenty of time for the barrels to fill back up. A job on my list is to empty them all out, clean them and then refit the fittings, possibly replacing a few of the older fittings.
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| The one's in the garden, much the same set up, fed off the shed roof. |
We tend to only fill these when we go on holiday now, to make looking after the chickens easier for whoever we rope in to do the task! 
When our garden was on the farm, we had ponds for water storage. Although it isn't as easy to hook up a hose or to dip from as your setup, the advantage is the water is essentially unlimited and it never leaks. We had a pump with an intake hose that we could throw in and fill up a large tank on a wagon which we would then pull next to the garden and use from it for a few weeks before having to refill.
ReplyDeleteOur current garden behind our house doesn't have any of that though. Fortunately our climate is such that I typically only water a few times in the spring when the garden is just getting established. During the summer, I let it fend for itself and just utilize the over planting and preserving the excess method so that in dry years, we still have veggies from a prior abundant year if the plants don't produce for a year or two.