- Hello, and a very warm welcome back to the garden.
I was just having my lunch, and I was kind of thinking,
what sort of considerations do we need to make
at this time of year as gardeners?
And we've gotta think about all sorts of things
such as compost, how our garden is looking, the boundaries,
and then suddenly it dawned on me that I haven't actually
shared our low-cost water storage system in detail.
So this video is all about how to create
a low-cost water storage system,
and now is a perfect time to do it
'cause you get it starting to fill up right now,
ready for spring.
The first thing that you need to consider
is what kind of container are you going to be using
to store your water in.
If you go online
and search for water storage tanks for sale,
you suddenly realized that it can get really expensive,
especially if you're trying to save thousands of liters
or gallons of water.
And it was in 2018 when we had that serious drought
that we suddenly realized that we needed around 5,000 liters
of water stored at any one point in time
to try and get us over that and to keep the seedlings going.
And if I was spending money
on around 5,000 liters of water storage in tanks,
that's gonna be really expensive,
and I needed an alternative.
(gentle music)
And that alternative came in the form of IBC tanks.
Now, the thing that's so awesome about IBC tanks
is that they exist all over the world
and they're really easy to source.
But you do need to do a little bit of due diligence.
You've got to do a bit of research and make sure
that whatever has been in the IBC tank isn't toxic
because you don't want to end up with something
that has had really bad chemicals,
and then you're going to be watering those chemicals
all over your plants and the garden.
And that isn't really a good idea.
Now, in terms of how much the IBC tanks cost me,
I spent £25 ($33) per IBC tank.
That was how much they were for sale.
Now, if they were more local,
I could have collected them,
and that would have cost nothing.
But because these were actually traveling
from over 100 miles away, and I was absolutely desperate,
I had to pay £75 ($100) for delivery.
In total, I paid £225 ($300) for 6,000 liters' equivalent
of water storage.
And had it been more local,
that could have been a lot cheaper,
perhaps more around £150 ($200) pounds, because IBC tanks
I've seen sell for low as £20 ($27), upwards to around £40 ($54).
And it's just about hitting it when the time is right.
This behind me is one of two water tanks that my parents use
for their house, and water tanks like this,
how they wanted 6,000 liters' equivalent would have cost
around £800-£900 (~$1150), not even including delivery.
So you can already see that going for IBC tanks
has slashed the price by three quarters.
I was just trying to do the maths, but yeah, three quarters.
There were so many ways of being able to fill up IBC tanks.
The one behind me at the top of the main vegetable garden
is the simplest.
So all I do is, at the top, I put in a pipe,
and I feed it from our main water source.
That's something that you can do, as well.
Or, if we've run out of water from our main water source
and we're in a drought, what we do
is we line a load of buckets underneath the barn,
and if it rains, we capture that water,
and then we carry it uphill and then deposit the water
into the IBC tank.
It does require manual work and energy, but it's worth it,
especially if it means that we actually have a means
of storing water in emergencies.
With the five IBC tanks here,
we could apply the same principle
as the individual IBC tank.
We could feed each one of them separately.
However, what we've actually decided to do,
and it was far more efficient,
but this is a bit of an upgrade, is to have one inlet.
And basically the idea is that this is the only tank
that has an external source of water coming in
which I'll explain in a bit more detail,
what that is for us in our situation.
And the idea is when this tank is full,
there's then a cascade kind of movement.
So then this tank starts to fill up.
As soon as it's full, this one starts to fill up.
And it's because we've got connecting pipes at the top
of each IBC tank to allow that to happen.
Now for us, if we're then during the season
wanting to use it, we start with this tank first
and then slowly move our way down
so we can start filling it up again.
The final three tanks are hardly ever touched,
but they're just there for security in case we need it.
And that peace of mind is really, really important.
You may have realized that these IBC tanks are sitting
on top of pallets and the reason why is that we can
have a bit of extra height
which allows us to use this outflow tap,
and to fit a watering can underneath.
Because if we put it directly on the ground,
then we're not really going to be able to utilize this tap.
And it just gives us that extra bit of gravity
to actually feed a pipe off into the garden, as well,
In order for water storage to be effective,
it has to be full of water.
And there are many different ways of sourcing this water.
I've already mentioned a couple in this video,
but the absolute best low-cost solution
is to use things like guttering on either a shed or a house
or potentially on your greenhouse, and then just
let it lead in to your water storage container.
Now this is kind of your general,
all-purpose rainwater barrel, but what you could look at,
if you have a bit of extra space,
is to actually capture roof water
into bigger storage containers and perhaps use something
like that cascade principle
that I've done with the IBC tanks.
This insulated undercover growing space
is called a polycrub.
And this was developed in Shetland
to deal with hurricane-force wind, et cetera.
I wanted to draw attention to it.
I'll be doing more in-depth videos about it later next year.
But I went to Shetland in summer of 2019
to look at some polycrubs there.
And there was an awesome example
of kind of thinking outside the box
in terms of storing water.
And it also shows you another kind of container
that you can store water in which is more suitable
for smaller gardens.
So I hope you enjoy this short little clip from that video.
- Part of one of the permaculture principles
is to reuse and recycle things,
and these blue barrels wash up quite readily
around the shores of Shetland.
I presume they're from the aquaculture industry,
but I'm not really sure.
So we collect these when we find them
when we're beachcombing, and they make ideal water storage.
We also discovered that this tile edging
makes a fantastic gutter.
And so all these barrels are being filled from rainwater
'cause you've got a huge water harvesting area.
We also collect seaweed,
which is locally known as tang from the shore,
and we make a compost tea from that.
- You can just about make out where the IBC tanks are
on the polycrub, and you might be able to hear
that there's a stream.
And this is actually the way that we, at the moment,
are filling up our IBC tanks.
And I just thought I'd share it with you
because it's something pretty unique, which I do understand.
So in order to do that, I've gotta walk up a bit.
So one of the main things that you've gotta do
is just make the most of the resources that you've got.
And because we're on a smallholding,
we've actually got a couple of streams here,
which is ideal because it means that we can use these
to actually capture our water storage.
So where I am now, is at the start of the water pipe
that leads all the way down to the IBC tanks
where we can then put the inlet pipe in.
Now, what we do actually have is two strands of piping.
We've got one that goes down kind of to the bottom
of the woods where it kind of just leads in
to the other stream.
So it continues going.
Sometimes we have to come in and just clear the silt out
a little bit, but then when it comes to needing to fill up
the IBC tanks, we just connect the two pipes together,
run the other pipe over to the IBC tanks,
and put it in.
And it is really simple,
but it's a great way to use the water that we have
because very often during summer,
these kinds of streams dry out.
And then if our spring dries out as well,
we're pretty stuffed
because we're off the mains water supply.
That's a process to create a low-cost,
but highly-effective way of storing water in your garden.
Now, if IBC tanks are perhaps too big for you,
and you can grow up the sides and over the top,
that's no problem whatsoever.
But if it is too big for your garden,
then look at what people like Sue are doing,
Sue over in Shetland, who has the blue barrels.
That, as well, will work really, really effectively.
And if you have any questions,
don't hesitate to ask me down below in the comments.
And I hope you're having a great start to winter,
even though we're not officially in it yet.
And I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Goodbye.