Connexions

A hosepipe ban has been implemented this last weekend until 16 Sep 25 in Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford and Cork. Proper order! The idea of using chlorinated drinking water to wash your car is repugnant to the planet - it's not great for the lawn microbes either. I've said it before and I'll say it again: get yourself a water-butt and attach it to the guttering.

 Not having mains water is fine / great. The water is 'free' and untreated with chlorine and one pal drives from miles away to fill up a 50 lt beer-barrel for drinking and brewing. But a power cut leaves us without water - for drinking, cooking, flushing, washing. Since we had the pump replaced last year, we've had sediment issues and I've had to clean more grit out of the filter in the last 15 months than in the previous 15 years. Indeed the first thing I had to do when I returned from France in June was to clean the water filter 3 times in 2 days: it was completely blocked.

Generally we do not water the veggies from the bore-hole.  The plants outside have to tek their chances. The beans, tomatoes and greens inside the polytunnel get most of what falls on p-tunnel plastic and gets diverted to various reservoirs. Over the years we have upgraded and replaced our stock of water containers and currently have 3x 120lt blue herring barrels; 1x 220lt ditto; 2x 1,000lt IBC; many 20lt mineral-lick buckets. At full capacity we have about 3 tonnes of water for irrigation. That would be plenty if Irish weather delivered the 1,000mm of average annual rainfall as 3mm every third day, preferably at night. But it is never thus.

Like in 2023 and 2018, we have had weeks without rain since the beginning of May and towards the end of June, I had exhausted all the reservoirs and was reduced to using a hosepipe from the bore-hole to keep my beans and tomatoes from shrivelling up and blowing away in the wind. I anxiously checked the weather forecast and tracked the MetÉireann rainfall radar as storms swept across part of the country. Not our part, however! Each belt of rain seemed to sweep her skirts away from our hill as if it deserved not a drop. Then on Sat 19th July it started a desultory drizz and A Lot more rain was promised overnight.

I have long had a system where the interior 1 tonne IBC replenishes one of two adjacent 120 lt herring barrels. It's set so that if we get A Lot of rain, the system overflows into the garden part of tunnel delivering some water adjacent to crops. It seemed a waste if we reached overflow levels in one of the pair of herring barrels and the other one still had storage capacity.  How would it be, I wondered, if I could connect the two barrels with a siphon so their water level rose in sync? And it was so [above R]; and the Lord saw that it was Efficient. The huge horseshoe of black pipe is about twice as long as it needs to be, but with siphons that does not impinge on function. It did rain in the night, I had watered the garden beds copiously the evening before but we still finished up with full capacity when the rain stopped about breakfast time on Sunday 20th July. Win!  It never rains but it pours and rained steady All the next night - it's hard to know whither to divert the water with everything in the p.tunnel so well soaked.