Watering Again

I received the low-pressure soaker hose I mentioned earlier. You can find it here. First, I tested it at home and it seemed to be working fine. So I built a platform 2 ft. high from 4x4's and 2x4's to hold a rain barrel up off the ground. This gives a slight amount of water pressure via gravity to feed the water through a hose to the soaker hose which I lay along a row.


I fill this distribution barrel from another barrel in my pick-up truck (hidden behind the cab in the picture). The transfer of 50 gallons only takes about 10 minutes with a nifty 12-volt water pump I got for $30 at Harbor Freight.





I attached about 100 ft. of light duty garden hose to the barrel. That'll reach anywhere in my garden. The soaker hose drains the barrel in about 2 hours. Voila! The garden gets watered and I don't have to carry water or wait around for the hoses to do it. By concentrating the water at the base of this row of bush beans, I am putting the water right in thr root zone.

We'll see how well this works. The forecast is for a continued hot, dry dummer and fall, so this system could be very important for us.

Tyler's Watering System

Tyler is bringing water to his garden in his truck. He got 2 50 gal. plastic water barrels at the Cenex Co-op and a water pump at Harbor Freight. Power for the pump comes from the small generator to on the left side of the picture. He gets enough water pressure to throw a stream about 40 ft., more than enough to water his garden. Hauling water this way is the best sure way to get water to the gardens, though I am still tempted to put in a shallow driven well just to see what it could produce.

Tyler brings water via a hose to his tomato plants. Beside each plant is a bucket with a small hole in the bottom. He puts a dollop of fish fertilizer in the bucket and then fills it with water. He has the healthiest tomato plants at the farm.

Watering

Our crops that are planted at nominal ground level seem to be doing alright without watering. Now in early July without much of any rain in the month of June, the soil is moist down about 2 inches and the water table is down at about 2 feet.

It's a different story for those plants we set on top of raised beds. In the early spring we had thought it wold be necessary to put most of our planting on raised beds or mounds to get the roots up out of the water table. It is very low here on Ebey Island. How wrong we were. We didn't know that the water table would drop as far as it has. So we have had to carry in water and we have not been able to carry enough to feed our thirsty vegetables.

Some of us have dug shallow wells for water, and the deeper of those are working OK. However after we've drawn a few buckets from them, they run dry and it takes a while for them to refill.

So here's my idea: Mount a plastic rain barrel on a short tower -- say 4 to 6 feet off the ground. Fill it with water and connect a soaker hose to it. Lay the soaker hose along the tops of the raised beds and let gravity bring the water to the plants a drip at a time.

But how to fill the rain barrel. Obviously not rain. Then I thought about my boat. It has a 12volt bilge pump with a switch that operates it when the level of water in the bilge gets too high. (All boats that have engines inside the hull leak a little around where the propeller shaft(s) exit the hull.)

I could mount a bilge pump and switch on a board and sink the board into the well, the pump can raise the water 10 ft or more easily to fill the barrel. I could put another float switch in the barrel to prevent the pump from running when the barrel is full. Voila!

Oops, where could I get 12 volts DC to power the system? I could use a 12-volt battery and a solar or wind charger. A 360 gph (gallons per hour) pump draws 2.1 amps. So filling a 50-gallon rain barrel would take about 8 minutes. That would take almost 16 amp-hours of power from my battery or about 20 percent of an 80 amp-hour battery. Not too bad.

Let's say that when the system stabilizes it pumps with a 10 percent duty cycle so it would draw .2 amps/hour. That 80 am-hour battery would last 410 hours (17 days). I suppose I wouldn't mind taking it home to be re-charged every 2 weeks. Or I could bring my small generator to the garden to re-charge it.

But I have a better idea. I'm looking for a small solar charger so that my watering system can virtually forever. The sunnier (and hence dryer) the weather, the better it will work.

Stay tuned to hear more about how this works.

Don't bother with water

The Dugways (in the big, grassy plot) have dug a well in the lowest part of their plot. Smart idea! Now they (and by invitation all of us) don't have to lug water to the garden for those tender young seedlings that need a little extra boost until their roots reach water. Thanks, Dugways. Just dip your bucket in the pool and be careful you don't fall in yourself.

I have dug a couple of wells myself. I had do go further than they did since our ground is a little higher. THis shows just how high the water table is on Ebey Island.