We have well water and we also have gardens that are not within 100 ft of our outdoor faucet or hose. One of my permaculture goals for this year, as inspired by my sea monkeys (yes sea monkeys) was to make a water catchment system that would water these gardens.
There aren't any buildings by these gardens, so a rain barrel would have to work independently. So can you use a rain barrel without it being hooked up to a gutter?
So far yes.
I chose this rain barrel because it has a large empty space on top that I could use to catch more water.
We drilled holes into the place where you would typically have a plant. We also plopped a mosquito dunk here. Side tangent, I was pleasantly surprised and happy to find out only last year that mosquito dunks are not poisonous! I handled these things with gloves and trying not to breath when I held them for years. Last year I happened upon an article that referred to them as organic. I did further research and read confirmation that these can be used in ponds that animals drink from! What??? So I use them in my rain barrel. Many people recommended gold fish to prevent mosquitoes in the barrel.
I thought it was mean to put them in a dark and probably super-warm-from-the-sun tank. I also think that the fish poo and stuff would clog up my faucet or drip hose. So we went with the dunks.
Back to the barrel without a gutter, so far so good. I did fill it up orignally with a hose because my plants were in danger of really drying out and I didn't have time to wait for rain.
Rain, though, has been keeping this pretty well topped off.
Back to the soaker hose, which is what this is supposed to be about, I chose this soaker hose because I could turn it on and wander off to do work and not have flooded my garden within an hour.
This post is just for those of you that want a drip/soaker hose but have found what I did. There isn't enough water pressure from the gravity in a rain barrel to make the drip hose work.
Darn it!
So after much pontificating, I chose to amend my soaker hose to see if I could make it work anyway.
Here's what I did. This is the link to the drip hose that I have.
A soaker hose is basically a plastic tube with many tiny whole that let water out into a cloth sleeve that covers the plastic tube for the length of the hose. The holes must be tiny because I didn't really see them and the lack of pressure from the barrel faucet made them not work.
So I removed the little green "hose repair" cap on one end of my 25ft soaker hose and slid the cloth material down. Please note, sliding the cloth down and then getting it back on will be the longest part of this project. Sometimes it feels like you won't get it back. You will if you keep working it.
After I had it halfway down, I used scissors to clip a tiny slot in the hose, starting about 18" from the end of the hose and made a slit every 15-18 inches right to about half of the hose. Remember, you're cutting the plastic hose inside, not the cloth cover. This is as long as I cut it. That was the whole snip, not the beginning.
I then slid the cloth back, replaced the green repair thing with its 2 screws. I removed the green thing on the other end, slid the cloth half way down and made a few more slits on this end. BUT I probably only made about 4-5 on this side.
The reason for this is, once I cut the first half and re-assembled... I was super happy to see that it was working the way I wanted it to, but there still isn't enough pressure to get to the other end of the hose. So you need to have an end with very few slits so that some water is forced to the second half of the hose.
I know, I know, 25 feet is not very long. I don't have all of the answers to this yet.
Yet we did get water dripping from the hose where it was just dry before!
I DO want to share this experience so that you guys can take this info and run with it and hopefully share your own ideas. What do you use on your rain barrels to take advantage of the water?
