How to water your garden with rain

In today's email:

• 💧 The big idea: How to use rain barrels for garden irrigation

• 🌎 Natural wonders: what happens when the sea meets the sand and snow?

• 🤏 The small idea: 59 plants for home-grown chicken feed

Plus, we've got a gift for you if you know someone who would like this email (more details below).

The Big Idea

💧 How to catch rain in your garden (Part 1)

Last week, we talked about why agriculture uses so much water.

TLDR; Tilling and pesticide use destroy organic soil content. This keeps water from soaking into the soil. Farmers use more water to keep crops alive — over 2 quadrillion gallons of it yearly, to be exact. But there's hope. Regenerative practices are on the rise, saving water in the process.

Saving water on a commercial scale is great, but what about in your backyard? We promised you all the tips and tricks to having more water on hand, and we're here to deliver.

Calculating your rain harvesting potential

Before you start buying tanks or digging ponds, you should calculate how much water you can get from a typical year of rain on your property.

If you've never converted inches of rain to gallons of water, the volume from an inch of rain will surprise you.

One inch of rain on one acre of land equals 27,154 gallons. Over one year, it adds up.

For example, our ranch averages 32 inches of rain yearly. We have roughly 30 acres. Doing a little math means that our property receives an average of 26,067,840 gallons of rain every year.

That's a lot of water. In fact, that's enough water for nearly 40 Olympic-size swimming pools (🤯).

Obviously, we could never harvest all of that rain. But we can capture enough to water our plants with abundance.

To calculate your property's total volume of rainfall, plug some numbers into this equation:

Total water volume in gallons = (length of property in feet) x (width of property in feet) x (average rainfall in inches) x (0.623 [the # of gallons per inch per square ft area])

The same equation applies to harvesting rain from your roof, so you can plug some numbers to find out how big of a tank you'd need to hold all of that water.

Catching water:

Over the next few weeks, we'll discuss water harvesting. We'll cover everything from swales to keyline design to fog nets.

Today, we're talking about the entry-level path to saving water in the garden: rain barrels.

How to use rain barrels

I like to think of rain barrels as miniature irrigation ponds. They can be any size — from 5-gallon buckets to massive 100,000-gallon holding tanks. While ponds are awesome for many reasons, rain barrels can fit in smaller backyards and don't suffer from evaporation at the same rate.

If your region goes through long spells of drought interspersed with quick spurts of heavy rain, barrels are a great tool for you to limit your reliance on wells or municipal water. We only need to catch enough water to tide us over until the next storm.

There's an important caveat to everything we're talking about today: these basic systems are not for household consumption, only irrigation.

Catching rainwater without a purification process could leave you feeling... unwell, to say the least. (Note: If you want water you can drink, you'll need extra filtration and first-flush gutters.)

There are roughly six components you'll need for a functioning (albeit basic) rain barrel:

1. Catchment area

2. Gutter to divert water

3. Filtering screen for leaves and other sediment

4. 1+ holding tanks with lids

5. A watering spigot

6. An overflow spout

Optional: a platform to improve irrigation flow

Important notes:

Catchment area

The most obvious catchment area is the roof of a house, garage, greenhouse, or shed. As a bonus, most homes in the US come equipped with gutters and downspouts.

But you don't need a roof to catch water. Tarps and plastic sheets are great temporary solutions for small backyard gardens.

Be sure to check what chemicals are used to make your collection surface. Asphalt roofs, for example, can leach toxic chemicals into rainwater and are not well-suited for food crops.

Holding tanks

Once you have your collection area, choose your holding tank(s).

Your holding tank can be as cheap as a plastic garbage can with mesh over the top 👇🏼

Or it can be as elaborate as this commercial 30,000-gallon tank 👇🏼

This step is up to you and your resources. Make sure you pay attention to how much rain you get per year.

As always, I find it better to start small and intensively rather than overshoot and unnecessarily waste money.

The benefit of going with a smaller rain barrel to start is that you can chain them together to maximize your rain harvesting (and space-saving) potential.

To chain two or more tanks together, I recommend leading the outlet of your first tank into your second tank and so on. It's a simple solution with less potential for leaky connections draining all of your water. If you go this route, you will need spigots on the bottom of all tanks in the chain.

Filters & insect control

For a basic garden rain barrel, the only filtration you need is metal or plastic mesh to prevent leaves and twigs from getting in the water. Old window screens do the trick quite well.

If you use a DIY tank, make sure to build a cover. If you leave a full tank of water open, you'll find out how much you don't like mosquitos.

Don't be too worried if a little bit of algae starts growing in your tank. Algae is one of nature's purification tools and won't impact the quality of your irrigation water.

Hardware

You'll be able to find all of the components you need for a basic garden rain barrel at most hardware stores.

You can always opt for an out-of-the-box 50-gallon solution like this one ($100).

If you go DIY, you'll need one spigot, one overflow pipe, a hole saw, a screen, and sealant for every barrel. Back of the napkin math brings the total cost of a DIY 50-gallon rain barrel to ~$60.

As always, questions about DIY projects are welcome to get you started.

Shoot me an email at [email protected], and I'll do my best to help you out.

🌎 Natural wonders for your eyeballs (10/10 guarantee):

• What happens when the sea meets the snow

• How Alaska sees the Northern lights

• A blood moon over the Sonoran desert

The Small Idea:

🐔 59 plants for homegrown chicken feed

Buying chicken feed can get expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Chickens are omnivores like us, meaning they like a varied diet.

Grain is fine, but fruits and nuts do wonders for orange yolks. Check out these 59 plants that will help you grow year-round chicken feed.

That's it for this week's newsletter.

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