Water Wise
Last April Alison B wrote that 2021 was the driest spring on record. This year, 2022, seems to have been even drier and Met Office records for Manston (the nearest weather station to us) confirm this:
2021 Jan-April rainfall = 171.3mm
2022 Jan-April rainfall = 67.8mm
The Met Office and RHS predict that we are likely to experience wetter winters and drier summers in the future. However this year, our British weather being as unpredictable as ever, we have also had a dry winter (100.2mm)! A dry winter followed by a dry summer would be a double whammy, raising the spectre of a dreaded hosepipe ban.
The RHS recommends that, in the future, gardens in this part of the country should have underground water storage tanks installed, to capture winter rainfall. This would be very expensive and Marden gardeners, being a resourceful lot, are already coming up with other ways to use water wisely - by maximising storage capacity and targetting our watering. Here are some of our solutions:
BIG BUTTS
This is my 1000ltr water tank, I got it from the Marden Gardeners Reuse/Recycle page when a local farm added 4 tanks free of charge, they had contained harmless chicken supplement.
I recently got our builder to make a stand for it from left over railway sleepers and he's going to adapt the outlet tap which is huge and in the wrong place to fit a normal tap that I can use to fill a watering can. I have a pump in it with a long pipe that I use to refill the water barrels that stand by the greenhouse. I must admit we got the idea for a pump from Cynthia and Graham Baker who have a similar set up in their garden.
The tank is connected to a small pent roof shed and it's amazing how quickly it fills up when we have steady rain.
Judy Taylor
This 1340ltr water tank has been in our garden for many years. We bought it on line from Tanks Direct, if I remember rightly.
The main difficulty when it arrived was getting it into the back garden over the side gate as it is so large. But once installed on a platform of breeze blocks and attached to a nearby roof, it has worked extremely well. I don’t think it has ever actually run dry as there has always been a downpour in the nick of time.
With a low level tap it is easy to fill a watering can and I can even fill another water butt at the top of the garden, by connecting the two taps together with a hose and turning on both taps until the other water butt is full.
Jane Cunningham
If space allows, an easy and cost effective way to collect more water is to link standard water butts together. Two or more butts can be joined together and filled from one down pipe with a rainsaver attached.
They can be linked with a special joining hose as shown here. Or two butts can be simply joined by a hose between their taps and both taps turned on until they are full.
In either case the butts will fill up together to the level of the rainsaver.
TARGETTED WATERING TO THE ROOTS
So we have some solutions to lack of rainfall, not to mention saving water by mulching, watering early or late to reduce evaporation and even reusing grey water by siphoning out your bath water! Any other ideas? Please tell us about them in the comments box below.