Buying Time Away from Civilization with Low Cost Rain Harvesting Strategies TPS-0029

I have to use this moment to share a very exhilarating experience while I'm still high on life.

I just had the most epic experience of romance with rain and thunder and monsoon summer storms.

I got to at least know that every time I'm capturing more, which means that I learned from the mistakes and from the limitations of the previous rain event.

I apply myself to building and reallocating funds and just increasing the infrastructure to capture more rain.

This time, it was the most epic experience of getting the most rain captured so far.

It's still a drop in the bucket compared to what I would need to sustain the minimalist system that I have as a permaculture subsistence gardening system.

But in order to scale that out and to have it be very resilient for drought periods, it needs to be scaled up quite a bit.

I'm just working within budget cycles, and trying to live on this principle that that when the markets are up I am obliged to take profits and realize gains and reinvest that into the regenerative infrastructure that I'm building and have that regenerative infrastructure sustain me through through the bear cycles, the bear markets and during which times I'm not going to want to sell the bottom.

I'm gonna wanna hold the assets, enduring the so called paper losses, and surviving and thriving in a permaculture, one man ecosystem in between.

It's been that cycling of extreme austerity and just freezing all purchases and staying still for months at a time, then going on a shopping spree, having learned survival lessons during that bear market, and taking that shopping spree and going and just trying to get still a very minimalistic profile of equipment.

It's still very, very humble. But the scaling of those principles is very interesting, because there's so many different ways that I can conceive of to expand the footprint of the area, that I can capture and funnel rainwater into ponds, into rain barrel, etc.

But given the extreme storming conditions and the sideways nature of the rain when it comes down during crazy windstorms, and how eratic it is, it's not like the northwest where it's a pretty gentle, steady flow.

Today I was curled up or laid out just trying to escape the heat and survive. And then a little bit of cloud cover starts coming in, and then a lot, and then it gets darker, and then there's thunder, and then it's like 30 min of torrential downpour, almost flooding.

I'm not gonna be washed away because it's very flat, a very mild slope.

Since I don't have the ideal which is just knowing that I've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of square feet just permanently installed to capture every one of those drops across as much of the property as possible.

If I could get a fraction of the footprint of this property to be permanently installed with very rugged catchment...

Ideally, it will be mostly ponds that are sealed with bentonite.

For now, a sort of prosthetic system to get towards that ideal, which would be a high ticket item, budget wise, to get the bentonite that would be needed.

It's a form of natural, nontoxic, pure clay that makes a perfect watertight seal.

It's very accessible, but it's very expensive. That's the dream, to be able to afford, just dump truck after dump truck load of that, just be able to carve out ponds, and capture and put to productive use the majority of the rain.

In the areas that the ponds aren't actually dug into the ground, I've already done the earthwork swaling and sort of trenching ditch digging in order to angle and direct the sheet flows from major rain events that would have otherwise just create this been massive flooding run off...

Though the ponds I dug in the sand, they're just waiting to be sealed, and then to be capturing the rain that falls directly above onto the surface area of the ponds.

That can be exponentially bolstered by the flows that are directed from what would look like irrigation channels and connected to swales, which are contour ditches that gather from a wider area and help to slow the speed of the water down.

So that mainframe of earthworking and ponding, the skeleton of it is done, but it does me no good now.

What I've got going now, which is pretty funny but pretty exciting to share, I've got a corrugated roof footprint that funnels down through some bamboo gutters that then down a rain chain into a galvanized tub.

So if it's raining hard, and it's starting to fill up from the roof, the little tiny home rooftop rain, then I have to manually bail that out over into the stock tank pond that has water, plants and fish at the moment.

It is that water that I use to irrigate my very humble bonsai food forest. So that was the chore.

It was totally bright for the most of the rest of the sky, but there's just this beautiful opportunity of a massive, thick, dark cloud system just pouring down rain right on top of me.

It was definitely a Laurel and Hardy kind of, zany piano music, kind of cinematic moment of making sure that tub doesn't overflow and baling water from that into the pond. Then sweeping off concrete pad, luckily, there's a collection point, just on a bit of a slant to the pad.

It was nice to get a free shower and be able to sweep through a choke point the water that's gathering, maybe a half an inch, to an inch in one area, and being able to sweep that violently and funnel that onto tinfoil catering trays, like oven trays, you see for catering a party.

I've been using those for the nursery, for seedlings.

I've got a box of them. So I just laid all those out, put rocks in them so they wouldn't blow away.

They were already starting to blow away on me. And rain came down.

It was a quick rain event, so only got maybe half an inch in a bunch of those, but that was a good haul.

I don't know how many trays full I got of sweeping water off of this little deck onto those trays.

Within seconds of the clouds moving past, I'm getting burnt by the sun so I have to go hide from it again.

Just that short burst of a blessing, literally more than ever in all of my life, it did something magical.

It actually bought me time, that sounds weird to say, because it's not really possible. I didn't really like take me back in time, or it wasn't a time machine.

But what it did for me in this economy of water that's very scarce, limited as far as the rain water that I get, and the rationing of the water that I bring in because trucking in water is expensive.

I found a cheap and decent source of it that's relatively close by. Still the fuel cost to do that, it makes the water cost a lot more. It's extremely expensive per gallon relative to free water from the sky.

So the vigor that I apply to capturing that free water from the sky is gonna be pretty extreme, relative to the cost of having of losing that water or letting it slip past, not capturing hardly any of it. Then feeling the pain of well now I gotta truck in more water, and because I had to truck it in, that's makes it makes it very expensive water.

It makes me very wary of using it in excess, but I would ultimately love to do things like take baths and have a regular sort of camp shower, rather than just doing spray bottle and sponge baths.

So it's very precious, all of its precious what I truck in and what rain comes down.

So given that trade off, the feeling of buying time, literally just the amount of rain that I captured just now, what it effectively has done. It basically doubled the amount of water that was in the galvanized stock tank, which means I have to use less of my trucked in stored water to keep that pond healthy and topped off and not too close to becoming anaerobic, which is a fine line of just keeping it above that little sense of it starting to give off a sense of any anaerobic smell.

Fish are happy. Plants are happy. I just gotta work out and a shower at the same time, and a beautiful, epic, romantic rain moment.

The water in that tank literally represents days forward that I do not have to leave my beloved property and risk all of the madness of the matrix, which is very minimal, because I'm far from the city, thankfully.

But even just crossing the property line, getting on the road, being in a vehicle, liabilities and risks to stack up and stack up.

Maybe that sounds agoraphobic...some people just really love their where they live. It's a different form of agoraphobia, to be in love with your land and feeling so de-risked and so at peace, and so in harmony and so happy to be away from all of the things you hear about on the news.

So anytime I'm forced out of my position to go back to resupply for anything, I dread it. I celebrate very hard when I get back in one piece with no problems with the vehicle and no run ins with anybody unsavory, no exposure to anything I'm trying to not get exposed to.

But when I look at that water that I just got right now, and I say that was the most crucial, vital water in my entire life.

Never have I felt so intimately connected with it? Because, if I did need to rely on it, I have the means to filter that to drink it. Even the stuff that had contact with the ground. I have no problem filtering it, but I have plenty of drinking water.

It's just a matter of getting closer to that point of now I have to start sacrificing drinking water to go into the pond. Part of the sacrifice of the pond is that, even though I'm shading it, it does evaporate. So it's a dwindling supply.

My objective right now, more than anything else, is to stretch my water supply, not to the very edge of it, but hopefully within a safe buffer of having at least 50 to a hundred gallons emergency supply as a bare minimum, and hoping not to cross that line.

But if I can comfortably maintain 50 to a hundred gallons and with the rest of what I had stored, and in addition to what I just captured, to be able to go for the rest of the month of August without being forced to leave the property in the blazing heat with the risk of breaking down in the middle of nowhere, it's not that remote, but in circumstances that are gonna be deadly because of the sun, and extremely costly because of the bear market…



The longer I can wait to be forced out on a resupply run…

I have enough food to last into next year and beyond, depending on how I play it, but comfortably fully fed beyond a year supply. That's all squared away.

It's been a question mark how far I can stretch the water and I wasn't expecting these last couple of beautiful rains, and it's been a blessing.

If that was just 30 min then I'm extremely excited and thrilled to imagine that, even if it takes me getting up in the middle of the night, the temperatures around the clock are so hot that I will not get hypothermia, getting drenched, getting up in the middle of the night, putting on a headlamp and getting out there and doing the same thing, sweeping as much water as I can, collecting it, getting into the pond, cycling through the roof catchment.

I won't be endangered by flash flooding on the roads. I'll be in a frenzy to get that rain, funnel to the pond and hopefully not get struck by lightning.

But if I do, it's a good day to die.

I'm used to rain events that go on for hours and hours. The last project that I was working at, it was almost right on the coast, there was a year round fog, and there were just massive rains. It would be raining solid for days and days.

I was so spoiled. There was piped in water for the farm, an actual farm with actual farm irrigation piping. So when it rained, I tinkered with rain water catchment a bit but I wasn't dependent on it so all that really meant was I don't have to water anything with the hose for a few days, that's great but now when I think about how precious every drop is now and how much I wish I had bought ten boxes of those catering trays...

That's a very modular cellular way to extend that rainwater surface catchment area without a huge expense of what it actually is to build solid installations of material that's gonna capture that water whether rubber pond liners, which I don't wanna go back to. I'm trying to go non toxic, so I'm waiting.

I would love to have dozens and dozens of currugated sheet metal laying around to just lay on the ground and put rocks on and dig holes below, with pits with cans or buckets or whatever.

The thing is, anything that's a structure is gonna get battered so much by the wind. It would be very expensive to put in permanent covered areas that you could walk under or sit under, they would be on on some sort of frame, and they would capture that rain versus just something you could lay on the ground.

So that's something I'll look into. It's something that I think would be within my ecological framework. It'll eventually rust out and turn to dust and be a non toxic, non burden.

Eventually I probably will get a bunch of those, but now I realize that something that's probably even cheaper and could be just as effective if I do the math...

I got tons of free rock. All the free rock you could ever imagine.

So if the system that I just that I just discovered...it's a little bit more labor intensive, but if I wanna conserve financial resources, and I literally have all the time in the world, and nothing better to do...These catering trays that are several inches deep. They're light, they're easy to move.

I can stack them up when I'm done. A couple of rocks set in them will keep them from blowing away they're not gonna slice me into like the corrugated metal.

The trays work well in the nursery so I get two functions out of them. So comparing corrugated metal sheeting, just laying on the ground and digging a hole on one side with a slight angle, to slope down and fill up a can or a bucket or something.

It's only good for that and other than that, it's a heavy nuisance that has to be lugged around, and I wouldn't want to just leave it out there.

But with these stackable catering trays, when it's not the rainy season, they can be used for the nursery. They can be used for starting seeds, for micro greens. They have multiple functions, and they're stackable and they're light, easy to work with.

It's a very interesting discovery, and it's a discovery that comes from starting with the most minimalist solution.

Knowing that, yes, I could have put in a bunch of money to build a system that only did one thing, which was capture water. That's the thing, it rains so rarely that whatever I put in for rainwater capture if it's a lot of money, and that's all it does..

With these trays, if I could that successful in that amount of time with that limited of array of catchment capacity...

The elegance of scaling the microcosm, the sort of fractal of the system, the elegance of scaling that...

Permaculture design, for me, has been the most empowering system of knowledge and technical training, because it has taught me elegant, very engaging, intimate, elegant ways to harmonize with these patterns.

The satisfaction of harmonizing with a pattern, it's so blissful.