Rainwater collection - anyone do it?

[Jar11591]

As our garden gets bigger and bigger each year, my girlfriend and I are striving to get more efficient and sustainable as it grows. We’ve reached the point where watering is becoming very time consuming. Our rain the last few years has been coming all at once, followed by a 2 week drought. So the logical conclusion we’ve reached is to start collecting the rain water to use during the droughts, and provide drip irrigation to the garden. 
 

Does anyone collect rainwater to use in their garden? If so, please share your set up!

 

[gim]

Two of my neighbors use a rain barrel.  Its just a big barrel with one of the gutter down spouts entering the top and has a valve at the bottom.  They fill their small watering cans with it when they need to water their garden or flowers.

 

If you have a bigger area to water, this might not be much help.

 

[Team9nine]

I did the same as above ^^^ at my last house, setting up 3 or 4 rain barrels on multiple downspouts. Doesn't take long at all for a good rainfall to completely fill them up, but they also don't last near as long as you would think if you have a large area to water. We used ours mostly for hanging plants and potted plants on our porches, which it worked well. You'd need to scale up significantly to a larger commercial setup, I imagine, if you wanted to do any size large garden, or go to an inground system like that used for lawns. 

[Kev-mo]

What size garden are we talking about? My dad used to to just use the back and forth sprinkler for his and move it every so often. I guess that could take up time because you have to be there to move the sprinkler but he would be doing other things while the sprinkler did it's thing. He also did the drip thing for some of the flower beds but pretty sure he still hooked up the hose to that set up.

 

You probably already know this but watering in the evening is better so it can soak in v. getting burnt off by heat of day. Not sure what you're growing but for next year could you group the plants by water consumption? Then when you do have to water maybe it's a smaller section?

[padlin]

I have in the past, I found 2 50 gal barrels was no where near enough. For drip irrigation, which I use for 6 scattered garden plots, needs some pressure to work, my lowest are 10 psi, you may need to run a pump.

 

just a guess, but I probably use 3 or 400 gallons to water 700 sq’ of veggies. I could measure it if you really want to know. I have one of these. Water meter

[Jig Man]

I don’t but the people who bought our place in the country have barrels at all of the down spouts on the house and out buildings.

[padlin]

I was way off, 500 sq’ for 30 min used 80 gal. So 2 rain barrels would water my veggies once.

[Jar11591]

Thanks for all the advice. My gardening space is a couple hundred square feet. Even if rainwater collection want enough to irrigate the hole garden, being able to capture some of it to use and not let it just go to waste is appealing.
 

For those that use the collection barrels, any problems with the stagnant water breeding mosquitos or water-borne pathogens? Guess it wouldn’t be too hard to give it some aeration to prevent stagnation. 

[gim]

Well my guess is that you would use it quick enough to the point where it woudln't stagnant for very long anyways.

 

Its true that mosquitoes hatch and reproduce in stagnant or standing water, but you need to water your garden nearly every day so I wouldn't worry about that.  Put a cover on it if you think it will sit there for more than a week at a time without drawing any water.

[Scott F]

I wish I’d have had some way to collect all the water that came out of my sump pump. This spring, we had so much rain the water table rose significantly. My sump pump cycled twice a minute for over a month before it started slowing down. My calculations show I pumped over 1 million gallons of water out during the month of April. When May-June came, I sure could have used some of that water in the garden and my lawn.

[BayouSlide]

We have a big rain barrel catching water which cascades off the back patio roof. Wife uses the water for plants.

 

We put some ditch minnows in there to eat the mosquito larvae. It's fun to watch them when we sprinkle goldfish grub on the surface for their supplemental feeding. Minnow topwater action. 😉

[gim]

5 hours ago, Scott F said:

My calculations show I pumped over 1 million gallons of water out during the month of April. When May-June came, I sure could have used some of that water in the garden and my lawn.

 

Wow that is a lot of pumping water.  We've had an extremely wet April-June time period here too and mine went off regularly, but not that much.  My house sits on a fairly high gradient, I have gutters/downspouts, and drain tileage in my foundation so that helps mitigate water intrustion, but the soil can handle only so much.

 

We've been in drought 4 out of the last 5 years though and we needed a wet cycle to recharge soil moistures, water tables, and our lakes/rivers so I was fine with it.

[Scott F]

Yeah, my pump will do 72 gallons a minute. It ran for 20 minutes out of every hour. That’s 1,440 gallons an hour, 24 hours a day for 30 days. That’s 1,036,800 gallons of water. And that was just for one month. Even after 10 weeks, the pump was still cycling continuously, but each cycle was longer than it was at the beginning. Plus, the drain line couldn’t handle the volume of water and had to be replaced as well.

[padlin]

A million gallon tank is 74’ wide by 31’ high, that’s a lot of water. You could have one hell of a swimming pool.