Hot weather and water

[Weedo]

Just for a laugh

Working in a Northern rural city for a few days last week and noticed this sign above garden taps outside the accomodation; are these people for real or is it a totally risk adverse society demanding sanitised water?

[ina]

I wouldn't drink rainwater - it contains all the muck, dust and bird shit that's been collecting on the roofs and other areas from which it has been collected for the past several weeks...

[Flo]

Now our allotments are on town water - do you reckon that's safe to drink?

[Green Aura]

You'll have to take a filter bottle, Flo.

I know what you mean, Weedo. You sometimes have to wonder how humans ever survived until chlorine, antibiotics and bleach saved us all. Although I suppose a lot didn't. Still, I think the general public's immune system would be a lot stronger with maybe just a little more exposure to a bit of dirt.

[KathyLauren]

The island where I used to live had poor groundwater, and a lot of people had rainwater collection systems to supplement their wells. Rainwater can be used for drinking, but the system has to be designed with that in mind.

They put a sediment collection tank in the line to collect the first few gallons of a rainstorm. Only the subsequent rain, after the roof has (presumably) been flushed makes it to the collection tank. The water would then be filtered and treated with a UV light before use.

[Weedo]

I travel across NSW and Oz for work a great deal and have done so for over 30 years, often to remote areas with poor water supplies and zero treatment. I grew up drinking rainwater. creek water and dam water; in our hot summers you take water where you can get it. I always drink the local water and have never had any ill effects (perhaps because they places are remote?) We have a tank in town we use for drinking water, the town supply stinks of chemicals, and on the patch it is untreated rainwater and river water. Three generations have survived this process so far.

One enterprising chappy from further south is catching and bottling rainwater and selling it you guys for $A8.00 a bottle.

[Weedo]

Wicking beds anyone? With the ongoing very dry conditions (high evaporation rates) I have trouble with raising young plants mainly because I can only get to water them once a day in the evening and sometimes only every second day. I can mulch when they are larger and I could spend up on automatics but prefer to look at other options. I read about wicking beds; basically a waterproof container with a layer of coarse material in the bottom that holds water (filled via a perforated pipe) a soil proof material above and the soil above that- theory is that water wicks up from the resevoir and keepthe soil moist.

Any experience with these out there?

[Green Aura]

I've not used them outdoors on a large bed, Weedo, but I grew my tomatoes in a similar system indoors. The results were quite remarkable.
Usually we gave each tomato plant a 10l can of water daily, but with these new troughs, configured as you described, three plants only required 3l. The top of the soil was bone dry, which was a bit scary but the plants looked fine and healthy and no blossom end rot or any other watering-type problems with the fruit.
I'm sure it would work very well on a much larger scale - I think you'd need to work out how to make sure the water can still reach the membrane all the time, even when it's lower. The plastic tray in our trough, that the soil sits on, has a few quite deep indentations which double up as feet and stand on the bottom, in the water, so when filled with soil do the wicking. And obviously there needs to be a tube or some such for filling - our trough has a little gauge that rises with the water level and has markings for full and "water me". I think it's quite important, you don't want the soil waterlogged if you over fill it.
Blimey that was hard to describe! I hope you can make sense out of it.
Another option, which I've described elsewhere are ollas - they work very effectively and are much easier to use, just dot them around the bed.

[Odsox]

Of course that would work, and work very well.
It's no different to at least 4 similar growing systems that I use here, including the simplest one of my windowsill troughs being watered via the saucer the trough is standing in, or the porous hose pipe I bury in my greenhouse beds and connect to a tap.
Back in the early sixties there was a spell where amateur tomato growers used "ring culture" which involved growing the plants in bottomless pots standing on a foot or so of sand or seasoned ashes. The sand/ashes were kept wet and presumably could be covered in some sort of waterproof membrane to stop evaporation, although I didn't do that myself.
When you think about it, your growing in drought conditions is no different than our growing undercover.
Of course a big benefit of these systems is you can use liquid fertiliser and deliver it to the roots, rather than evaporating on the surface.

[Weedo]

Thanks folks - this backs up the info I have found so far.

[Weedo]

With the removal of our old veg patch pending total re-construction (just way too many inherited soil & pest problems to manage effectively) I have finally built two outdoor wicking beds to test. I followed a design from the Gardening Australia for no other reason than I needed to pick one from the many available and purchased most materials for convenience. No doubt the design will be refined over time and the materials will be more scrounged and self produced rather than purchased. I have the IBC,s from organic liquid fertilisers bought for the larger patch; they are non-returnable

The design uses an IBC cut across to provide two beds, a coil of 50mm slotted drainage pipe in the bottom, bedded in about 300mm of 10-15mm gravel and with a rigid filler riser to the top of the bed; a drainage / water level monitoring bung in the bottom; a layer of geo-textile on top of the gravel and about 400mm of organic material rich soil over that.

The Gardening Australia site is below - two things about this though - 2/ the Adelaide Hill do not get that hot, we get plus 40c for days at a time with hot Nth winds and 2/ the construction is not as simple as made out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obNWr8MD0uU