Rivenrock Gardens Cactus Blog… go to www.rivenrock.com for edible cactus

  There’s all kinds of different needs for water around the world.  What we take for granted in the USA is something of a rarity when you look the world over.  A friend of mine from Mexico told me that in his village the cheaper houses are at the tops of the hills…. there is no water there, and the people must tote it from the bottom to the top to use. The people who can afford it are at the bottom where the springs and fountains are, they don’t have to carry their water as far to their house. No one in his village had running water indoors when he was young. And they all had hard packed clay floors.

   Due to our level of hydrology management, system of government, and relatively abundant water resources we have relatively cheap water in this country. This has caused us to be a bit wasteful and overindulgent.  So the first thing to do when contemplating your outdoor water needs is to determine how much water you actually do need. A large water-intensive lawn might be the wrong thing to have in most of Southern California… better on many levels is the large garden with plants from the ‘Mediterranean Climate’ areas of the world. Similarly, in most other areas it would probably be a good idea to use plants adapted to the local climate. This in itself will mean you don’t have to ‘baby’ the plants as much.

   Group all plants of similar water needs near each other. This will mean any mechanical means of water-distribution can be handled easily and efficiently on one line of pipe. They can then be on the same watering schedule. 

   You will also have to have water for any livestock you may have.  Cattle and horses and all other animals and fowl take a lot of water, and you want pipes they will not accidentally knock over and break, yet you want them close enough to the pens and yards so that it will be easy for you to care for the animals well.

   A garden should have its own pipe to it always under pressure, from there you may want several standpipes with hose bibs and garden hoses for easy watering of different crops in different seasons.

   Make sure that the areas you plant are in the appropriate conditions that suit those plants…. even though we get little frost, I have difficulty with broad-leaf tropicals such as ‘Elephants ear’ since they take so much water in the summer. If I cared to water them a lot, they’d grow, but I don’t want to coddle plants that are not well suited for this warm dry climate.

   Once you have your planting and distribution areas determined, you work from the individual sprinklers upstream… figure what kind of flow you will want, and what your water pressure will be…. this will give you the size of pipe you will need…. there are a series of formulas in this all….. and the flow of water and other fluids through pipes is an interesting science (hydrology). There are issues such as friction from the inner walls to consider, so the larger the pipe the less this causes issues…. yet if you go past a certain amount you waste money on pipe that is large but does no better for those emitters than a size or two below that (the law of diminishing returns). So the formulas and theory of this should be researched…. They say “if you can’t explain it to your granny so she understands it, you don’t really know it that well”…. and “if you want good info go to the master of the trade”… in this I elect a fellow named Jess Stryker. Jess Stryker’s pages on sprinkler design are very good.. I use his formulas for my own work.

   I’d also recommend rural people locate their storage tank high on a hill if possible, this will give you a stable water pressure, and water even when the power is out. Without such a system, you’d need a generator for water if the power goes out.  With our two tanks on the hill, we have water for a week or two if I don’t water plants.

   When you are considering the initial sprinklers or other water-emitting-devices, you have to consider the root characteristics of the plants you grow. The flow rate of those devices and their numbers will determine the sizes of pipe you will need. In general, you should use the most efficient water emitting devices you can… but there are difficulties and limitations with each kind.

   Sprinklers of any type can be hard to adjust to odd-shaped areas.  Sprinklers can also have much of the water lost during sprinkling due to wind… and some plants can become more susceptible to mildews due to the leaf moisture. For most plants, drip systems can work better. They can be supremely adaptable, and easy to change to fit different plants that you move in or out.  They emit a constant drip or tiny stream of water onto one spot, it can then soak deep into the soil… this can usually help greatly in reducing water usage.  Deep watering can encourage deep roots, and those deep roots will be nice and cool on hot days… the deep water in the soil will be shielded from evaporation by the layer of topsoil over it. Since the water is more ‘targeted’, it is not used on areas that don’t have landscape or garden plants… those areas might be less likely to grow rank with weeds due to not getting watered as they do by the ‘overspray’ or ‘drift’ from conventional sprinklers. All-in-all, drip systems work well for most people.

   Again, knowing your plants is important. Cactus is in general a lot different from other plants…. you’d think they’d have a big taproot, but they instead tend to have a lot of roots spreading out like the spokes of a wheel. They run only a few inches under the ground… they are designed to catch up the quick two hour rain storms many parts of the desert have.  When the ground gets wet a few  inches deep, then the storm ends, the sun comes out and bakes the ground again….  plants with roots just below the surface will be taking in water for the few days before the ground has fully dried. For this reason we use sprinklers…. but for efficiency, we use micro sprinklers… they are tiny little sprinklers that spray some twenty feet across and are fed by 1/4 tubing to the 1/2 inch tube that is hooked to hose bibs.

   So the very first thing is to consider the needs you will have for water, and design from that point all the way to the water source which is your well, tank or water hook-up.