Advice about reusing plant water needed

[Rich.H]

Sat today thinking about how I can better use the space I have for growing and after some geeneral time wasting online I saw some nifty methods of vertical gardening. This led me down the path of some design ideas for growing things all over the front and back of the house.

A brief summary would be as follows.
Place as many rows of containers on the wall as possible leaving a gap between each row for plant height. At the lip of each container row run a small tube with nozzles as if working a drip system. This tube snakes around the entire wall so all rows are covered with one tube.

The tube starts up by the guttering and is fed with a modified diverter as if filling a water butt, so rain water naturally runs down to feed all the containers. The excess water then feeds a butt on the floor so as to act as storage for dry spells. In this case a heavy duty pump inside the butt feeds a second tube that runs up the downpipe from the guttering to a t piece on the main irrigation tube.

This way a simple couple of minutes pump time on dry days means I can still happily water plants up the wall using the same system as the rain water.

Now my other idea was to have the irrigation tube terminate into the water butt, thus meaning I never actually waste any water other than to evaporation from the plant beds. But can I reuse the water in this way with no filtering or treatment or will it cause problems for my plants?

[Thomzo]

Hi Rich

John had some interesting ideas along the same lines using milk containers, a few years back. Try this thread, you might find it useful. http://www.selfsufficientish.com/forum/ ... as#p251404

Zoe