How Smart Gardeners Collect Rainwater Automatically

Without water, all the hard work we put into our gardens would go to waste. Summers here at least are getting hotter, and that means our plants are at a higher risk of shriveling up. But why use treated tap water from your house, when you can just collect it for free from the sky? In this video I'm going to show you two quick and easy projects that do just that. So let's start by establishing why rainwater is so much better than tap water. Tap water, especially in hard water areas, has a pH of around six and a half to eight, and that means it's neutral pretty much to ever so slightly alkaline. Tap water is also loaded with dissolved calcium and magnesium. Over time this can actually start to raise the pH of your soil, which isn't ideal for most plants, and it can even lock out some key nutrients. For acid-loving plants like blueberries, azaleas and rhododendrons, this can start to cause real problems. But even for everyday crops like tomatoes, brassicas and, say, squash crops, watering with a slightly acidic, mineral-free water, like the stuff that falls from the sky, is simply better for your plants. Rainwater, on the other hand, has a naturally acidic pH of between about five and a half and six and a half. It's naturally soft, and as it falls through the sky it absorbs a little bit of atmospheric nitrogen, which really helps to feed your plants, helping them to green up and stay lush and verdant. The challenge, of course, is collecting enough of it and then storing it so it's available when you need it most, typically in the summer when it can be frustratingly dry. The best time to set up a rainwater harvesting system is in the winter, when it's naturally wetter of course, but the second best time, as they say, is right now. In my garden, for example, I use two of these watering cans to water one of these small pallet collar beds. Now, each watering can contains around 10 liters or two and a half gallons, so you can see it really won't take long to empty a barrel of that typical size there, especially when you consider I have 18 beds like this to water. So let's start by taking a look at a typical water barrel. Now, this one here contains around 225 liters or 60 US gallons of rainwater, or at least it will. That sounds like a lot, but in a hot dry summer it drains very quickly. So a good place to perhaps start is to work out how many beds or growing areas you have, and then how much water you might need to water those areas. Add in a greenhouse full of, say, tomatoes or young seedlings, and a patio of pots, and it all soon adds up. To keep plants quenched the right way, we will want to collect as much rainwater as possible, so have a wander around your garden and see what opportunities there are. Now, of course there's your house roof, and in my garden there's also the shed here and an outbuilding over there. So let's start with this shed here. Now, it's got a pitched roof that sheds rainwater on this side and that side, so the perfect opportunity to collect lots of rainwater by popping a water barrel here and then one over here. The first job is to install some guttering on each side along the drip line here. So what we want is the guttering on this end here to be slightly higher than down here where our water barrel will be, because the water will obviously flow downhill. Now I've just checked with my spirit level here, an app on my phone I downloaded this morning for free, and the good news is the shed is completely level. See the bubble in the middle there? So that means that as long as I am measuring so that the top bracket here is about half an inch or a few centimeters above the bottom bracket here, we'll have that nice drop that we need to get the water to drain through smoothly. Fabulous! So let's get this first bracket, our highest bracket, in position. And there we go, our gutter stop end outlet is on the other end here because that's where the down pipe will be, and we'll put the brackets in between. But to get a nice level playing field for all of our brackets I'm going to just put in a string line now and we can use that as a guide. Now what I'm doing is I'm making sure that the bottom of the bracket, the cup if you like, is touching, just kissing the line there, and then I know they're all going to be on the same level there. So I've got my guttering here, now I could have got a longer section that would do the complete length of the shed but it wouldn't fit in my car, so we're going to do two bits and use a gutter union. But the first job is to put the end cap on here just to stop the you know, coming out the other end. The gutter jointing bracket is going to go there but first of all I'm just going to put in my first length of guttering, clip it into place and I can adjust it to suit. Right there's our first length of guttering in, hurrah! So I'm now going to measure from here to the end outlet to work out how much more gutter we need to cut to size and then fit that. One little tip is to use a bracket as a sort of slide rule type thing to mark the position and then that acts as a handy guide for sawing it as well, so you get a nice straight line. If you have one, a decent sized hacksaw is probably easier than a wood saw and then once you're done, just if you've got gloves, run your finger off or just use your shirt like that to get rid of any burrs and of course sweep up the bits of plastic before you continue. Job done. I'm going to put the water barrel into position now because that will tell us how much downpipe we need from here. Now it's on a stand so that I can get the watering can underneath but you could use slabs, bricks, anything like that to raise the tap or force it at the bottom here up so you can get a can in underneath but I would say that's about right. So now I'm going to measure and see. So there's our downpipe in, now I've got to get the water that comes from here into there for which I have a rainwater diverter kit. So this bit goes on the bottom of our downpipe, just fits on like that, there we are, and the hose goes into a sort of inlet there and it screws on in the inside. Beautiful. There we are, I've fitted this little gutter guard mesh thing just to keep out the leaves. You can get some that clip along the length of the guttering but this is a convenient height just to scoop out as I go along each autumn so no need for that. Now let's see if the whole thing works. Phew, that seems to have worked! Now the final thing to do is just to put a lid on it. This will keep the light out so it doesn't get all algae growth in there and keep things like mosquitoes out as well and just keep it nice and clean in there because we are beneath the tree that sheds lots of leaves. Now this is a repurposed water barrel from elsewhere in the garden. You can often pick these up second hand for not very much or you can sometimes find those big blue barrels as well, those are very cheap. Whatever you use you will be saving money from day one if you are water metered because every drop you collect is one less drop of tap water. So whatever you want to take things to the next level, perhaps you've got a much bigger roof surface area to harvest your rainwater from, well this is where this bad boy comes in. The IBC tank. IBC standing for Intermediate Bulk Container. IBC tanks offer extraordinary value for money because they hold so much water. They hold around a thousand litres or 260 US gallons which is four times or slightly over four times your standard water barrel. Now you can pick these up anywhere from around $50 or £30 upwards and once you've got them in place it's a real asset to have. Look for ones that are food grade, that means they're going to be nice and safe so they either will have the words food grade on or a little kind of fork and cup symbol. Ones that are not food grade may have held chemicals in, obviously you don't want any traces of that going onto your crops. I'm going to pop it here next to this outbuilding and with this existing downpipe here which I've already trimmed a bit and I've leveled the ground out nice and level here. I've used some slabs just to kind of give it a nice firm footing. We want a nice level surface, we don't want it on soft ground because when the IBC tank is full it will weigh a literal ton and I'm putting this extra pallet on here so I can raise it up to get that watering can underneath again. Our IBC tank is made of clearish kind of plastic so lots of light is going to get in there which means algal growth and all of that beautiful rainwater will turn green, so to avoid that and so the plastic doesn't degrade as quickly we need to cover it all over. I've got a purpose-sold IBC tank cover but you could just paint it with black paint, say two coats to make sure no light gets in there and it'll last a lot longer that way. Okay, great. Before we connect this up I just need to sort out this roof space here and this decidedly dodgy looking guttering, and it's a bit of a mess frankly. It's worth clearing off moss or in this case ivy that you might have on your roof just to give a good clean surface so more of the rain is able to wash through down to the guttering rather than being intercepted. So I'm going to just pull away most of it but I'm going to leave some at the sides for wildlife. Now I should say that if you're working on a roof that has tiles just be careful you don't unseat the tiles, you want them to stay nice and tight and please, please be safe, do this with someone else at least holding your ladder and keeping an eye out for you. Safety first, don't fall off, goodness. While I'm up here I'm going to take a chance to clear out the guttering as well. It fills with leaves, bird poo, all sorts of guttering gubbins and it's all organic matter of course and will all end up on the compost heap over there. Well this is a video about rainwater harvesting after all and looks like we're in for plenty of the wet stuff so let's get this filled up, but first I'm going to fix some of this guttering. If you've got guttering just check for any leaks, this gap here really gushes out when it's raining and I'm missing all of the water from that half so I just need to fix it. Right good, all sorted. Leaky loose guttering is a common problem with older buildings so it's worth taking, you know, 10 minutes or so just to tighten up any brackets and check for those leaks. Now if any kind of muck and gubbins was to get in here, it could turn the water foul and give it a sort of rotten egg smell and just generally make it pretty fetid and unpleasant, so I'm going to fix this kind of straining sock thing onto it and screw that in place and it's got a 45 degree pipe ready to connect to the downpipe there. This can be removed at intervals, shaken out or even washed. So I've cut this to size to fit and that goes onto an angled join there, but before we do that... like elephant themed collecting water, never mind. Now I've been a bit of a silly billy when I was buying the different components, this is at about a 65 degree angle and this is 45 so it's a bit strained. You want them to add up to 90 degrees so both 45 degree angles ideally, but I have a solution and indeed for any join like this is this really strong tape here. I call it duct tape and I can just put some rounds of that on and that'll hold it nice and tight and make sure it's completely watertight, although it is as it stands to be honest. So this tank comes with a very big tap but not very much use for filling up a watering can, so I bought this kind of adapter thing just to screw onto the end there. Top tip someone told me once is like righty tighty lefty loosey which is perfect. And then finally belts and braces, we've got our little filter sock in there but there's no harm in putting in another gutter guard thing in the top here. This is an old out building so I'm going to just leave this as it is now, but if you were putting this next to a house or something you wanted to be a bit more precious with, you might want to put a sort of overflow pipe here to direct any excess water should the tank fill up away from the foundations of the building just to keep it safe, ideally perhaps funneled into a pond or some sort of bog garden for example. Now I happen to rather like the utilitarian look of this thing, it's doing me proud, but if you don't like it and you think it's a bit unsightly you could always grow climbers up some sort of trellis supported around the side of it. One idea for all of these hollow cavities here is to stuff them full of branches to make a little bug hotel as well. What I love about water barrels is that you can just join as many as you want in a kind of linking daisy chain format by using a linking kit, so it just goes in the hole here, drill a hole through into the hole here, link it up so when this one's full it overflows into this one and you can join up as many barrels as you like that way. It's always fun to work out exactly how much water you can collect. Now using my garden as an example, we've got the two water barrels on my shed and that big old IBC tank which together will collect around 1,450 litres. Now that is a big step up on what I was collecting before, which will make a power of difference in a dry summer. Believe me, I've never been so excited about it potentially raining later on today. If you know your average rainfall totals over a year, you can work out what you can actually capture over that time frame. Now where I am we get around 31 inches which is 78 centimeters of rain over a typical year and we're getting a little bit now. Even a modest roof of say six foot by eight foot, that's two by 2.5 meters, your average kind of shed or greenhouse for example could collect, allowing for losses, about 3,000 litres, that's 800 US gallons over a year. Now imagine a bigger roof like the one on your home for example, and you can see how you could potentially capture over 10,000 litres even more each year. Considering how fantastic rainwater is for collecting to water your garden and save on valuable tap water, it's surprising that in some US states it used to be restricted, although today it is actively encouraged in most states and you can even get tax incentives I believe in some places. The exceptions are Colorado where you can still collect 110 gallons over two barrels, that's still quite a lot, and Utah where you can collect up to 2,500 gallons, not litres, without a permit, so still quite a lot. But of course laws are subject to change so just make sure to check the latest situation where you are. Maximize the quality of the rainwater you're collecting as well by making sure that your barrels or tanks are kept nice and clean. So empty everything out, usually in the autumn, and then just kind of use some warm water, splosh it around, just get in there and scrub the sides to remove any kind of detritus and sediment. Then once you're done, reinvert them and then get them ready to fill up again just in time for that wet winter weather. Just keeps everything spic and span. Whether you start with a single barrel like this or go all in for a big old tank like this, every gallon of water you collect is one less gallon you will have to buy, and of course one more gallon of genuinely great water for anything you grow. Now do please check out all of the watering and irrigation options in our garden planner, and you can try it out for free with our seven-day trial just head on over here. Or for more on surviving dastardly droughts and heinous heat waves, check out this video next. Stay cool and wet, and I will catch you next time.