Gardening
Water of life
Denis Wood
It appears that less water from the skies is descending (at least, at the time of writing), and it may be that a present deficiency will soon become a serious shortage, leading inevitably to complacent official acts of vandalism in flooding beautiful, irreplaceable valleys like Otmoor.
So far, until the rain falling on our roofs is bugged by Universal Interferers, it is free—and something which we would do well to 'conserve and use as a part of a ,self-sufficient economy in the same way as we should recycle ,garden and household waste to 'make compost to preserve the fertility of our land and, incidentally, also reduce the load on official refuse disposal systems.
A first step would be to see that all house gutters are either connected to discharge at one point or, if this is impossible because of the arrangement of the roofs, to ensure that rain water, instead of pouring into gulleys and discharging into sewers, is collected in water butts disposed around the house, the overflow from these butts being connected to large tanks either standing above ground with easily removable wooden covers or, in the case of larger tanks, sunk below ground level. To take an example, a moderate sized four-bedroomed house measuring 60 ft x 30 ft could collect in a year about 20,000 gallons of water which would be a very useful reserve in times of drought (a tank to hold 20,000 gallons would have to be of the order of 40 ft x 20 ft x 4 ft deep, the size of a shallow swimming bath, but a tank even half this size would still make a useful reservoir). All this, of course, is additional to whatever normal rain may fall on the land. This bonus ' would, in practice, be used first on vegetables, plants recently put in and those plants too often neglected, in particular hedges which seldom receive enough natural water because rain tends to bounce off the top and also because the plants are so close together that they compete fiercely with each other for w-hatever is going, chiefly water and nutrients. All Nails growing against house walls,' patd-'•
ticularly south-facing Wail5; generally go short of water "be='.' cause rain never falls direCtly'at " the base of walls and this shOrtage)1 of moisture is aggravated by heat absorbed by the bricks or stones of a house, causing evaporation from the soil.
Water butts are useful primary collectors (their overflow going into larger tanks) because, being above ground, the water inside them is at atmospheric temperature and, being also soft, more congenial to young plants than cold, hard water from a hose. Water from underground tanks can be,pumped up by submersible pumps and connected to hoses to water the distant parts of the garden.
Owners of houses which have old wells and fill them in should undergo severe penalties. To me it is a sort of murder to destroy a well. The profundity of wells give some people the willies but this is no excuse for filling them in. They can be covered over against the time when resolute men of stouter moral fibre take over the property.
Where there is a stream it can often be dammed to make a pond or small lake from which water can be pumped by petrol or eleC-' tricity to irrigate the land. In these days new ponds can be made without vast expense by spreading lumps of clay and puddling them over with a few passes of a track-laying machine, bulldozer or drot.
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