Conserving water does not have to be difficult and actually can add a bit of landscaping appeal to your garden.  The rain barrel concept has been around for a very long time and I recall we had a cistern at the farm house where I grew up.  Rain water stored in a barrel or cistern is not quite ready for drinking water unless treated, but it can be used for gray water (e.g. washing, toilets) or simply as irrigation. I think we have been so use to readily available sources of water that our old school conservation practices disappeared.  Almost everyone can use rain barrels, although you should check with your state.  I recently learned that the state of Colorado has limitations to storing rain.  As a resident you are not the sole owner of the rain that falls on your roof that mother nature provided.  You can read more about the water rights of Colorado here.

The Benefits of Rain Barrels
Rain barrels are great for a many reasons. They save you money by reducing the amount of clean water either pumped from your wells or provided by your water treatment plant.  Collecting rain water can help you cut down on the amount of drinking water you waste on your lawn, which will reduce your monthly water bill and save you money.  I will have to admit that my water bill has not significantly reduced since I am only storing 100 gallons at any given time compared to the thousands you see on your water bill, but I know that I am reducing the waist of treated water used for irrigation.  By using the rain water, you are reducing the energy used to treat and pump the water to your home.

A big factor that I have yet to run quantitative numbers is the amount of runoff preserved at any given rainfall.  In my county, stream and bank erosion is significant.  It is to a point where I have seen 10 feet of bank erosion over the past six years where erosion up to this time was minimal.  Most of this is caused by poor stormwater management practices where builders continue to cover land with impervious surfaces for roads, driveways, and patios.  The impact is so significant that in Fairfax County, the engineering groups working in surface and groundwater hydrology, river hydraulics, and sediment transport have considered changing the ten year storm maximum rainfall to more frequent five year storms.  This is not because of climate change, but that the volume of water is so significant that runoff volumes must be increased to model upstream and downstream impacts.  Imagine if you had to buy flood insurance because 500 year storms were now categorized as 100 year storms because or governments did not manage development and stormwater appropriately.  If you assume 70% of all residents within any given city stored 100 gallons of rainwater after each storm, the runoff reduction could be significant.

Keeping a lawn requires a lot of resources. A lawn requires a massive amount of water - a third of all residential water use in the United States goes towards landscaping.  Using rain barrels can help keep a nice green yard without the eco-guilt.

How To Install Rain Barrels

Installing a rain barrel collection system requires little more than a container, a screen to keep out bugs and debri and some hosing to attach to the barrel for watering your lawn and plants. I have decided to use reclaimed whiskey barrels.  My decision has two significant reasons in my opinion; 1) It is reclaimed and the real oak barrels add a nice touch to the yard or garden and 2) they are not plastic.  Plastic looks like… well, plastic and we know that plastic is not considered very green.  If you have some plastic containers used on the farm, then please reuse versus throwing away.  Below are my steps that I used to create my rain barrels.

1) I first drill a hole in the bottom for a valve to hook a standard water hose.  I used an external water valve.

2)  I installed a faux port hole from seaventures.com.  I used a standard door screen underneath to help keep mosquitoes and gutter debris out of the barrel. Seaventures.com offers other options for their port holes.

3) I used a hole saw to cut the appropriate sized hole to install the overflow pipe.  This was an update to my original design (I’ve made two major modifications since my first rain barrel).  The overflow pipe was installed on the right side since I knew the direction where I wanted any extra water to go.

5) For protection from weather, I used teak oil and a polyurethane treatment.  The first coat is still drying.  I will post pics and update this blog once the final coats are dry.

One problem with rain barrels isthat water is typically gravity fed.  That means you have to elevate the barrel, have a down hill yard, or bend over a lot to keep the water hose below the water line.  My solution is a solar charged water pump.  I got the idea from a solar charged electric fence on my dad’s farm.  It is basically a toolbox with two switches (solar charging and pump), a 12 volt pump, and 12 volt garden tractor sized battery.  A trickle charging device was added for over charging, but the solar panel used does not provide that significant of a charge to be concerned.

If you would like to purchase or want more information on my rain barrels, please contact me at info@headspringfarm.com.  The current price is $395.00.

Thank you for reading.

Mike

Over the past year, I have been supporting volunteer organizations to promote and manage “River, Bay, and Ocean Friendly Gardens (RBOFG)”. There are many organizations that focus on planting native plants and educate gardeners on why native planting supports a healthy watershed. Most county park authorities have a program to ask volunteers to help manage the invasive plants that have taken over our parks. Below are a few items that you can do to create a RBOFG.  Some organizations also call this “Bayscaping”.

1.      Plant native trees, grasses, ground cover, and shrubs: Plants native to your region will reduce pests, disease, and weed problems.  Since they are native to your area, they reduce the amount of fertilizer, herbicides and water, too.  There is a list of native plant resources to the right under the heading “River, Bay, Ocean Friendly Gardens”.

2.      Test the soil: Test the nutrients in your soil before you consider using fertilizers or chemicals.  Avoid the usual routine of applying fertilizers just because a company tells you to apply in the Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter.  

3.       Fertilize only when and where necessary: Over fertilizing contributes to nutrient loading (nitrogen and phosphorus) that pollutes our Rivers, Bay, and Oceans.  Use organic fertilizers like algae and corn gluten products. Residential runoff has become a much larger issue as more development has occurred around water regions. Residential lawn applications typically do not follow minimum specifications for lawn applications. Residents are not too concerned about their bottom line like farmers. Again, test the soil before you apply.

4.      Identify plants that are invasive: Use proper disposal techniques and be aware of Resource Protected Areas (RPAs) in your region.

5.      Utilize compost as fertilizer: For a healthy, river friendly garden, create a healthy compost pile that reuses food waste, grass clippings, yard waste, and other natural ingredients.

6.      Mow the lawn at the proper height: Set your mower blade height to 3-inch. Cutting too short never allows the grass to get ahead of the weeds. Consider using a push mower in place of a motorized mower (helps with air pollution, too).

7.     Reduce pesticides and herbicides by least 50%: Toxic chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides can poison your yard’s balanced ecosystem and may end up in your local stream.  Planting native helps since native plants are generally tolerant of the pests in your area.  Leave the clover in your yard for a year.  If you feel you must control the clover, treat it every other year instead of every year. Clover is a legume which means it puts Nitrogen in your soil through the Nitrogen Fixation process.

8.      Reduce water usage:  Over watering does not allow plants to establish a root system they normally need to survive during dry conditions. Install cisterns or rain barrels to capture rain water for use later.  

9.      Reduce lawn size: How much lawn area do you really need?  Install larger mulch beds and planting areas.

10.    Got Buffer? Plant buffers of native trees, shrubs, and gardens in the remaining yard that will soak up excess nutrients and prevent soil erosion. This helps manage runoff from impervious surfaces. Stormwater management is becoming a big problems in cities and is costing counties millions of dollars due to erosion.

11.   Plant perennials instead of annuals when possible.  Annuals require more wasted resources due to the extra water, transportation, and plastic flats (to name a few) needed in providing these plants to consumers annually.

12.  Reduce Polluted Runoff - Use a Broom Instead of a Hose. Avoid watering your sidewalk and driveway. Watering your driveway and sidewalk is probably the biggest abuse to our drinking water. The ocean does begin at your front door.

If you have suggestions or want to add some links that are local to your area, please contact us here.

Sometimes it is difficult to find a single source for recycling and reclaiming materials. Over the past several months, I have read and received references for recycling information and places to take my building materials. The benefits of recycling include:

• Extending a product’s lifecycle by reusing for other projects/projects;
• Saving money by not paying landfills to take your debris;
• Practicing sustainability in agriculture and construction industries;
• Materials such as drywall and roof shingles can take up a lotta space in landfills. Building debris accounts for more than 100 million tons of waste each year; we can repurpose a lot of it. Example: Used drywall can be remade into new drywall;
• Easier than whistlin’ Dixie. Many contractors will do the dirty work for you (i.e., find a recycler and haul the materials away).

Here are just a few resources. Other suggestions are welcome!

Where to recycle asphalt and other construction debris? Before you send it to the landfill, try finding a place in your area that will recycle asphalt, concrete, frame metal, drywall, shingles, and wood.

• The Construction Waste Management Database contains information on companies that haul, collect and process recyclable debris from construction projects;
• Habitat for Humanity also accepts certain materials for reuse;
• Construction Materials Recycling Association (CMRA) provides a directory for recyclers and reusers of heavy-duty materials like concrete and drywall;
• Earth 911 - enter roof shingles or whatever you have and your zip, and this site will bring up a list of recyclers in your area;

Want to know what incentives your state offers to clean up your energy act? Visit that Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (DSIRE). DSIRE is a comprehensive source of information on state, local, utility, and federal incentives that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Where to drop off items like old cabinets and sinks: Reuse and Reclaim Centers provide a great source to support sustainability. You can drop off things like old cabinets and sinks. Not only does this save landfill and landfill fees, but it also provides a source for cheap useful materials for consumers. The Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA) is a non-profit educational organization whose mission is to facilitate building deconstruction and the reuse/recycling of recovered building materials.

Item to note: When getting quotes from potential contractors, ask if they will take care of recycling the materials, so they are handling it for you.

Have feedback or more references worth mentioning? Send us an email from here.

I recently had the opportunity to get a tour of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (http://sio.ucsd.edu). I attended this tour to learn more about the new SPHEAR (Scripps Partnership for Hazard and Environmental Applied Research) program. It was an incredible experience and I felt fortunate to learn about the research projects currently in progress at Scripps. When I first learned about SPHEAR, my intention was to learn more about how the private industry could support the research projects associated with satellite communications to support ocean monitoring and sensors to capture important data. What I learned on this tour expanded beyond this focus and I decided to add this blog to express the importance of understanding our climate, its changes, and impacts to agriculture.

As you can imagine, Scripps has some impressive equipment to collect data from the ice core samples taken from polar ice. This equipment is able to determine the atmospheric composition for the given year determined. Given what I assume is centrifugal force that forces the isotopes with more atomic mass to the outside, the atmospheric makeup for a specific year can be determined (e.g. oxygen and CO2) in parts per million. By studying the atmospheric makeup, the researches are able to chart the stability of our climate way before agriculture as we know it existed.

Based on the data charted and studied to date, our climate did not stabilize to a predictable certainty to support year-after-year farming until 10,000 years ago. What does this all mean and what is the point of this blog? Mr. Kirk Gardner, who gave me the tour, explained that the researchers shared their data with anthropologists to confirm that our transition from food gatherers to farmers did not all happen from advanced evolution of intelligence, but that the transition to agriculture happened because our climate allowed it. If our climate today was as unstable as it was 10,000 plus years ago, we could not, with some predictability, count on average temperatures, rainfall, and seasons to produce the crops, forests, and pastures to support continuous food sources in a non-nomadic civilization.

Will our climate experience the instability that it once did 10,000 years ago? Probably, but that could be tens of thousands of years from now. My point is not to predict the next instability in our climate, but to point out the importance of keeping track of these changes and do what we can to protect and sustain our environment by considering the impacts of our actions.