Rainwater Harvesting

On Monday night we had some long awaited rain. A good shower yielded nearly 150 gallons of water in our new rainwater catchment system.

Rainwater harvesting is one more way in which Beardsley Community Farm strives for greater sustainability. Tennessee, like much of the southeast, has experienced one of the driest years on record in 2007. The drought has been hard on gardeners and the environment. The need to keep our crops irrigated forces us to use large amounts of costly municipal water. This drives up the cost of food production while putting stress on local water supplies. Our solution:

This 900-gallon catchment collects water from half of our barn roof. A 1000-gallon system (soon to be installed) will collect water from the other side giving us 1900 gallons of storage capacity. We expect to be able to completely fill this through the winter with only half the average rainfall for Knoxville. This will give us a great head start on watering next spring. We hope to reduce our dependence on Knoxville’s city water supply by at least 50% (in a good year the reduction will be much greater).

We constructed this system using three 300-gallon and four 250-gallon plastic tanks that we got from Advanced Polymer Recycling. Ben and I gave the tanks a good scrub with detergent and borax, using a power washer.

We got our fittings and tubing from Industrial Plastic Works and Davis Hose and Supply. Davis Hose were very helpful with figuring out exactly what parts we needed to make the thing work.

On Thursday afternoon, Marie and Beth used our first "harvest" of rainwater to establish some winter rye.

Rainwater harvesting is the beginning of what we hope will be a comprehensive water management plan for Beardsley Farm. Eventually we would like to have some kind of drip irrigation in place using a human powered pump. It will feel good to be off the grid with such an important resource.

Peace
Frank