Harvesting rainwater

Last year saw the UK's highest-ever temperature only a few miles from us at Coningsby, Lincolnshire 40.3C!

"Water is the driving force of all nature". Leonardo da Vinci

There was a prolonged drought from June to August, reservoirs, rivers and water tables fell and many water authorities implemented hosepipe bans.

Farmers here are having to irrigate crops earlier and for longer. Many are creating their own reservoirs to store water to use in dry spells from small ponds catching rainwater from glasshouses to large artificial lakes.

Having self sufficient water supplies was a necessity in the past and is becoming so again. How did we arrive at the system that we now use to take care of the irrigation needs on our smallholding? We'll also examine how we calculated our water needs, how we designed our catchment and storage system and share how we use the water that we've gathered.

CALCULATING OUR WATER NEEDS

Our approach to calculating our water needs was simple. We water with both watering cans (often in the greenhouses and poly tunnels) and with hoses. Every watering can is 10 litres of water. Six cans a day is 60 litres. A water butt holds 300 litres so...wait...just five days supply!

We also have an extensive vegetable garden, two fruit cages, many pots, gooseberry and rhubarb beds etc. On average that takes half an hour of watering a day if we use a hose. We looked up how much water a hose uses and found that a normal garden hose uses 1,000 litres an hour. To say we were shocked was an understatement. We use 500 litres watering for just half an hour a day in Summer. Honestly, we checked the figures repeatedly because it's thousands of litres a week! Even with that sort of watering our onions were very small this year which we put down to prolonged dry weather.