Get Every Last Drop: Harvesting Water

We dry apples for winter pies and put up fruits as preserves. Might as well add water to the list of gathering the local bounty.

  • Topic: Watering
  • Author: Cindy Bellinger
  • Keywords: water, harvesting, rainfall, runoff, water catchment, catching water, rain barrels, cisterns
  • Date: July 2006

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We dry apples for winter pies and put up fruits as preserves. Might as well add water to the list of gathering the local bounty.

Any surface such as roofs, driveways, or parking lots, generate large quantities of water during rainfalls. If it’s not caught, it becomes runoff, which really means it’s not being put to good use. Water runoff also means erosion—if not on your property then someone else’s.

The approximate roof runoff calculates to about 5 inches of rain produces 3.1 gallons per square foot. The average annual rainfall for the surrounding areas is Santa Fe, 13.99 inches; Pecos, 16.21 inches; Espanola, 10.12 inches, Albuquerque, 8.66 inches, Los Alamos, 18.53 inches.

In some cities it’s illegal to construct water catchment systems, but not in Santa Fe. And these systems can be as simple as setting a bucket under a downspout or as complicated as a cistern that’s hooked up to a 1,000-gallon tank.

Following are different ways of catching water:

  • The most common way to catch water is using rain barrels with spigots and overflow valves. They also have screens on top to keep debris and bugs out. (You don’t want to breed mosquitoes.) Barrel sizes range from 50, 75, 100, 200 gallons. Typically a barrel needs to be raised higher than the ground it will water. Set a barrel on a stack of cinder blocks, two or three high, under a downspout.
  • Cisterns are large capacity containers, either above or below ground used to store rainwater. Rainwater is directed off the roof through gutters and downspouts into the cistern. Submersible pumps raise water from underground cisterns; above cisterns operate on gravity flow.
  • French drains are covered trenches used to catch then slowly disperse rainwater to specific areas. Dig a trench from the water source (roof, driveway, and parking lot) to the area where water is needed. Place a perforated PVC pipe in the bottom of the trench,
    line the trench with gravel, and backfill with soil.
  • Terraces of stone, brick or wood are the more traditional method to retain water on slopes.

Modifying the topography of your landscape is the least costly way to retain water. Observe where water goes during a rainfall and determine the best way to slow it down so it can soak into the soil. Two ways of doing this are with swales and berms.

  • A swale is a shallow ditch excavated along the contour of a slope. The excavated soil is placed on the down slope side to create a mound.
  • A berm is a mound of earth.

It may not rain a lot around here, but the deluges do come. And however you decide to catch water, your garden will thank you.