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Commenced:
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01/11/2014 |
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Submitted:
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03/01/2015 |
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Last updated:
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07/10/2015 |
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Location:
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Carmel, Indiana, US |
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Climate zone:
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Cool Temperate |
(projects i'm involved in)
Project: Sunburst permaculture
Posted by Adam Schwarz about 10 years ago
The last few weekends have been a real pleasure, now that the cold winter has ended and the weather is becoming progressively sunnier and warmer. They have also been extremely busy as we can now get on with all the stuff we have been planning over the winter. Most urgent is the raised vegetable bed, as we'll need to start planting the first seedlings very soon.
We spent a couple of weekends schlepping compost (10 yards) and mulch (6 yards) from GreenCycle up north of Noblesville. We originally had arranged to have it delivered, but since we needed it dumped on the back of our property, this was not possible as the 10-ton truck would not have got very far over the grass it would need to traverse. So instead I rented a pickup truck and spent a total of three days shuttling back and forth, 30 minutes each way, >10 trips in total, 1-2 yards each time.
We thought this would be plenty, but we've used almost all the compost already on the raised bed. We may need to get some more for the terraced garden.
We also ordered the drip hoses and various attachments to provide hassle-free gravity-fed watering - at least that's the theory! They arrived quickly and yesterday we tested the concept.
We'll probably need a larger rain barrel but for now I just mounted the two we already have from the old house on some piles of cinder blocks (one to capture overflow from the other) and swapped the water exit over from the other end of the gutter. The total length of the raised bed is nearly 200ft so I joined two 100ft emitter hoses (www.rainbird.com). One concern I had was whether the gravity feed would provide enough pressure to push the water right to the end. I hooked everything up and it basically worked. It took a few minutes for the water to work its way to the very end - and the pressure will be less as the barrel empties so we'll have to see how that works out. Also, we only tested it from the higher of the two rain barrels as we don't have an overflow pipe rigged up yet.
Overall I was pleased the basic concept seemed to work. In addition to a larger rain barrel we also need to make the rain barrel setup a bit more aesthetic - it is pretty ugly at the moment, but sufficient to test the idea and hopefully provide some hassle-free watering, at least some of the time!
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