This is a report back on the progress of this flood sport operation that I'm working on, which is really perfecting and optimizing the process of
adapting and innovating rainwater catchment solutions in the desert. All this with the consideration that, whereas rainwater catchment is usually considered something you would do with earthworks, meaning contour ditches aka swales that act as collection points for sheet flows of water in rain events, depending on where you are in the world, and the soil type and the slope that will yield different results.
But here in the desert, relatively flat area, the likelihood of there being sheet flows of water to capture with earthworks is very minimal, even when there is massive, almost flood like rain events, which I've experienced here now.
The sand is so absorbent, so porous that I have not yet seen the dry creek beds, the very minimal dry creek beds that are here actually flow across the surface.
So I don't know if it'll be another year, another 5-10 years, a hundred, a thousand years before those dry creek beds run again during a major rain event. But I did a lot of design work and a lot of human scale shovel earthworks, to direct a system of swale into a system of ponds.
With the hope that finances will allow a massive allocation of funds required to adequately seal the ponds with bentonite clay.
That is the ultimate goal to fulfill over time.
But in the meantime, the reality that capturing rain water in swales and distributing it to ponds, it's gonna be a very rare event.
It's gonna be all about more intermediate measures, meaning capturing the rain water when it comes down by any means necessary, and then storing that in tankage over time that can be used to fill very small pond like aquatic environments, aquaculture, productive systems that are on a very micro scale.
I call it my Bonsai Food Forest. In there, I have a number of fruit trees, herbs and green and other crops growing, they're all being irrigated by the pond water that's alive with fish and water plants, going through phases of showing me what they require to make it or not from one year to the next.
Through all the seasons, I basically experience what, one entire year of what does well and what doesn't do well so far out here.
That's gonna be an evolving process. But the point being, without that bentonite, being off grid, off road, having to import whatever water that I can capture from the sky, means that everything is kept at a micro scale.
Eventually, with bentonite on hand, I'll be able to seal a number of ponds that will at least be seasonal and productive if not be a process to get them to be year round, and that would require some epic scaling up of rainwater catchment to be able to, to maintain a livable water quality and water level over the dry months.
But those intermediate measures, because I do not have a lot of structural rooftop square footage to capture rainwater just passively hitting the roof and going into gutters and going into collection barrels or tanks underground.
I started out with the most basic catchment of the rainwater hitting a tiny home metal roof and going down a rain chain and collecting in a barrel or a basin, harvesting that after the rain, and just transferring it with a little galvanized two gallon pail.
Just hand transporting that catchment or that harvest, just straight over to the approximately 200 gallon stock tank pond.
Figuring out the balance of how much I can spoil the crops with irrigation, and how much I can scale the crops out within that somewhat real time rainwater budget.
That's what I'm really getting figured out is how do I wean off the water supply from the outside as I scale into catchment?
I had to just import 55 gallon drums, and then later scale out to more larger forms of tankage and phasing out plastic and moving towards galvanized and but basically starting out on the continuum of I gotta import water.
I gotta get a truck that can do that, which I did.
Then I have to scale that out so that I've got at least for my own hydration and sanitary needs...very wisely used, very frugally used.
I'll have the ability to keep myself alive with an amount of water supply that will, if used wisely, at least last one year at a time.
And so minimize my exposure to the outside world.
Then give me this new space opened up to the start shifting from irrigating and hydrating myself with the same water that I import, to capturing rain water.
And then first, starting with the irrigation, start to phase out the water from the outside going into irrigation, then phase in the rainwater going into the irrigation, figuring out that balance, how that balance can work.
Then eventually I will phase out my own use of the outside water and I'll be using the appropriate filtration and purification methods in order to feel comfortable and safe, both irrigating with the captured rainwater and hydrating myself.
For now, I'm at a point where the strategy that I have implemented to scale up from just the simple, very small, tiny home tin roof capture was to scale out into a temporary measure of not sealing the ponds yet. But next best thing that's reasonably affordable relative to the industry standard of EDPM rubber pond liner material, which is about five times more expensive than what I settled on as the intermediate option, which is 20 by 20 foot, 16 mil tarps that you would see being used to cover boats or leaky roofs. Just industrial uses, drop cloth, whatever.
They're just the standard. I searched for a very thick gauge, very heavy duty, tarp model and started out with two of them, although I wish I would have gotten more, but I wanted to test them first.
So I'm at a point now where I have successfully tested those two tarps.
I was able to develop a method in order to anchor them into the pits. I dug the pond pits, they're about 30 foot diameter, three to four stepped, concentric circle, sort of inverted pyramid, cylindrical, pits that for them to be ergonomic while digging them out. Basically, you dig one ring, and then you descend down and drop in, I've decided on about about 3 ft. Three foot rings that have, about a shovel depth maybe closer to a foot.
So just imagine concentric circles, stepping down into the ultimate low point, the ultimate pit, and then so you have steps to get in and out of it and to and dig down one segment at a time.
Over time, the wind around the edges, still retaining enough of that step structure to be able to get in and out of them without damaging the structure of it, or just falling, it’s actually navigable in that sense by design. The wind will round out those step edges from the original carve out, it makes it a nice, smooth surface.
The thing to overcome was the issue of, okay, if you're gonna lay the tarps down in there, how are you gonna keep from blowing away?
Because often, you're not gonna get the rain event without a bit of a storm, without some winds and tarps of that size, trying to wrangle them.
It's very difficult. That in itself is a very frustrating workout, managing that process so in the process of training and drilling while doing dry runs literally with installing these tarps I figured that I should start with carabiners tied to parachute 550 parachute cord and then tie those to wooden stakes that basically make a T shape, two pieces of wood, 1 ft length, two by twos fastened together to make a T shape and then inverting that T shape and digging it into the ground so that there would be an anchor point that the parachute cord could be attached to by drilling a hole through it.
So it's buried underground. The consideration is that wood material is far safer than pounding re bars, which I'm very averse and try to avoid whenever possible.
They always surprise you. In fact, I was surprised by a number of them here that almost popped tires and impaled my foot at times.
So randomly, one time walking past, and just being like, it was like seeing a scorpion. There was something that affected me, an abnormality as I was walking by. Probably just the last wind storm exposed it a little bit, and I know what that is.
Almost stepping across it and being like, nope. And then I dug it out, and it was like a two foot submerged, rusty, sharp re bar piece pointed straight up right over where I would normally be driving within a few inches.
I just couldn't believe it. Then there more than one of them within the area.
Hopefully that was the only area that that'll happen. But anybody who has had similar experiences would know. It's scary and it's reasonable to wanna avoid that. So my thinking was, I wanna sink something in the ground that I can put some rocks around at the surface so I can find them if they get buried in sand and storms, and also so that I can not trip or get injured on them.
That was the solution to bury these wooden anchors and then tie carabiners on paracord to them so that I could hook into the eye holes of the tarp.
I measured that out, mocked it up, and it worked well in dry runs.
There were several times where it threatened to rain, and it never did, or it was just a tiny bit, and it evaporated before it even amounted too much.
So I did get a bit plenty of training in installing them, putting them in, taking them out, kind of optimizing the speed the methodology to very rapidly deploy them into place and in the face of winds.
I could get multiple anchor points down after the first four corners and also have a methodology to to sweep them off and fold them back up and store them securely out of UV exposure so they can last a long time.
It's just been a matter of back and forth, back and forth, putting them out when it looks like it's gonna rain, or when the forecast says that it's gonna rain, and trying to time that as best as I can.
There were some disappointing drills that happened.
There's now been two or three, from mildly significant to very significant rain events, where I was able to really put them to the test and get the results that I wanted.
Then optimize and iterate upon the water harvesting method, which is now the use of a drum pump.
It's plastic now, but I'm gonna upgrade to stainless steel as soon as possible.
But that drum pump, just carefully, slowly treading and kneeling on the tarp, and being mindful not to puncture it, but trusting that it's built to last and that it can handle a bit of actual usage. Just getting out there to where the water pools up in that lower pit of the concentric circles.
Extracting as much as can be extracted with that drum pump, and then using a tin can, or even cupped hands to get the very last bit of it, then just rolling the tarp over, sweeping off any of the of the remainder, and then folding it back up and storing them again securely and out of the sun.
So that strategy is what I've decided on, or what I designed and then implemented and tested, and it has proved successful.
It's held up during the wind, once there's weight from some rainfall in the base of that pit, then even if it's really windy, it'll stay down, and it won't just flap itself away, which I was worried about.
The paracord is holding up perfectly. I'm gonna definitely upgrade the carabiner because I see them starting to bend, and I've lost a couple of connections.
I'm just gonna keep overbuilding and overbuilding until, there's no more incidents of breakage.
Optimize and upgrade some of the overbuilding of the process.
But as far as the unit itself, the module, the fractal that can be scaled up from. I'm very happy with it.
What I call the shovel fist implement that I developed in order to save my back.
After using shovels for years and discovering that the ergonomics are actually destroying my lower back more than I ever wanted to admit.
But because I could get away with it in my earlier decades, and I can't get away with it now, I've been forced to really ergonomically correct the way that I move the Earth by hand, and that is to be kneeling and having a shovel literally strapped to my forearm that looks kind of like a wolverine claw but it's just a sort of half sized shovel almost like an entrenching shovel.
If you imagine imagine having your entrenching shovel and then having it strapped near the elbow at the top of the forearm, and then having a handle bar going latterly so that you could operate it with a closed fist and have the shovel be coming up and out from above your fist, from past your fist.
Well, that has been the saving grace of my back and what slowed me down. But it has been a major beneficial game changer for the ergonomics of this process.
If I'm gonna be doing this everyday, scaling out and digging more of these pond systems eventually to be filled with bentonite, but being the place holder rainwater catchment system, being these tarps then, I'm going to continue to dig as many of these as I can.
Because the more I do, the freer I get. This is a very correlated metric of the amount of gallons I can capture in a rain event, it’s directly correlated to the number of days I do not have to risk going out into the matrix, back into civilization.
I extend my resilience and self sufficiency and sovereignty here on my land by every gallon that I capture, and so every drop that I miss, it's like burning a pile of money, raindrops that I failed to capture and store and put through my systems and put through myself is money that I have to burn to go, literally burn fuel, to go and import water from the outside world.
It's painful and tragic when...the last time, it was the epic fail of being the biggest rain event so far since I've been here. The solution I had in place before the tarps was inadequate and failed slightly before that rain event, and I was left almost completely without catchment, it was very painful.
That's what sparked me to just go beast mode and just keep digging and devote myself to this process and pray that the anchors would hold and the tarps wouldn't fall apart, and I would be able to upgrade to an intermediate level.
Short of spending $500 on a rubber liner, I could spend a hundred dollars on a tarp, and that will scale much more affordably.
Probably those rubber liners under these conditions would be about equally subject to puncture as the tarps.
Yet they're five times more expensive. Not that they're not five times better because I have used them in other applications.
But you would want to have underlayment, and you wouldn't be moving them in and out.
They wouldn't be these sort rapid response tools. You put under layment down to protect the base of it, you fill it and it never gets exposed to direct sunlight ever again.
And hopefully you have stuff growing on the bottom, in the top and in between, so that you're not really exposing it, even on the surface. Where the lip comes up, you will be putting rocks and plantings and whatnot, overhanging the edge of that liner.
So you wouldn't even barely see it, if at all.
So this is a much different circumstance. I would not wanna buy a $500 rubber liner and have to try to anchor it down.
So this is making a lot of sense. I'm scaling it out. It's working very well. I'm very happy about it, very excited about it.
What I'm learning in the process of being forced to scale down the plantings and the management of the of the ecosystem, to literally the smallest bonsai.
Even though I have acres upon acres. Because of the climate, because of the financial climate and the the desert biome.
It's a game changer, a major paradigm shift for me to be forced into such extreme austerity with the horticulture.
So the value of it is that it's teaching me what I can get away with in terms of health and wellness and productivity, pushing the limits of my own deprivation.
Pushing the limits of the deprivation. This is the first time I haven't had a spigot with an on-tap water supply from the grid.
So it was always tokenistic and theoretical to capture rainwater as a sort of like symbolic act, in other places throughout my life.
Not only were they more temperate climates, but with being spoiled with that access, there was no reason, I didn't go out of my way to force myself to figure out the ecology and the economics, the budgeting of rainwater to grow the food that I would need to survive.
And to start with that being only a small share of herbs and veggies and whatnot, to then eventually, over time, providing calorie crops and liberating me 100% from all of the external systems of food and water supply.
On that continuum I've been at places where I was way further ahead than I am now. But that was because it was a temperate climate, there was water supply on tap here. I would say, maybe along that whole continuum, I’m maybe 10-15 percent of the way of where I wanna be.
But this is my first land project where I own the land. I'm doing the effort to invest time and energy and resources into a long term strategy that hopefully within ten years of dedicated daily effort, not leaving and not working for anyone else, and spending as many hours a day as I reasonably can, given the extremes of temperature and the limits of my aging back. I will incrementally approach that 100 % goal of all of my water comes from the sky, all of my food comes from the ground.
And I'm not burning fossil fuels for any reason. Any computing that I wanna do is...I'm already 100 % off grid in terms of energy, which is great. So that's one thing to be proud of.
That took some dialing in, and that took some optimizations and build outs, some study and a number of years to get to a point where it was really working well and balanced out.
So I'm confident this will be the same just modularization, scaling up, building on successes, shoring up weaknesses, and getting closer and closer to a point where, like the next time it rains, the big rain that I failed to capture was ten times as big as the rain that I succeeded at capturing just the other day.
Or that my systems in place at the small scale they were, now I could capture the maximum amount, given my capacity, and top everything off.
But in that rain event back in October, where it was about ten times as much and I missed almost all of it, I realized at that time that if I sincerely focused and dedicate my myself, undivided focus on on getting this system tested and building it out and scaling it up over time as resources avail themselves.
Then when that next ten x volume rain comes, if I have a number of these tarps laid out, it's gonna get to a point where one rain event is enough to to irrigate my crops and hydrate and maintain my sanitation for at least a year or more.
As long as I'm able to capture enough rain to get me through until a similar rain comes again.
Whether that's within a few months or within a year, or even two years, I'm looking at this now with the perspective of if that ten x volume rain, when it happens again, I will really hope that I will have not just two of those tarps out and ready to capture it. But I'll have five to ten of them out and the storage tankage to match so that I'm looking at several years worth of storage at any given time.
Then not stopping there and continuing to build out until eventually I'm looking at enough water stored to last years beyond that, and then hopefully, at some point, converging on that timeline is the ability to start scaling in and replacing the tarps one at a time with bentonite clay as the sealant.
Then going from capturing rainwater to seasonal ponds to perennial ponds.
Hopefully the productivity of those longer lasting aquaculture pond systems will actually yield financial rewards, financial yields so that I can do whatever it takes and have them continually refreshed natural rainfalls. But then during dryer periods, maybe they get sort of stacked, nested and stacked into each other in the sense that if I have twp, maybe I keep one of them fully stocked and ecologically productive with productive plants and and fish stock when the temperature is cool and there's less evaporation. The other ponds that are sealed can be auxiliary backups to that pond and have some seasonal growth cycle.
But know that they're gonna be sacrificial, or that they're gonna be growing green manure, growing vegetation that can be used for composting and whatnot, but not putting in expensive fish stock, they would have to either all be harvested at once or try to catch and move over to the main pond. That will be the one that survives each summer.
It's an interesting horizon to imagine how this dance is gonna evolve to where I go from these very early stage processes to getting to a point where the effort put into every stage of the system is actually nested within an overall bigger picture, the longer term design and there's no double work. There's no egregious sort of cost in reworking something that completely obliterates what came before it, rather, what's the base foundation...
All efforts are built upon in an elegant manner and upgraded in a backwards compatible sort of way, to where everything builds on itself, so long as each phase proves itself out as being successful, and so far, if it's unsuccessful, then it gets iterated upon and innovated on until it is then that's the platform that builds from there. So who knows what I'll be using for anchors and the size of the carabiners and cordage material, but that notion of pinning a tarp to a dug out pit to capture rainwater versus building a bunch of structures that are probably gonna get hammered and blown away by the storms anyway.
That is an interesting strategy. I have not seen it really in practice in my career.
But there's all kinds of strategies in the survival movement for being in a remote wilderness and using plastic sheeting, and actually putting it on top of a hole, digging a hole out, cutting branches off and letting them in the sun, under the plastic sheeting evaporate, and then putting a rock on the on that sheet, over the center, and putting a pot in that pit.
Basically you have a solar still that gravity drains the collection of the water evaporating on the that plastic sheeting, and down to a point where it drops into the, the basin.
So these concepts have been with me, the ideas of, adaptive strategies for rainwater catchment, adaptive strategies for filtering water that's already on the ground or in the ground.
It's the foundation of all of this stuff. Water is the most essential input for survival.
Hopefully, if I could make one PSA at the end of this it is to say what I've learned in this process of being very abruptly shifted into extreme desert austerity and going from on road, on grid, on tap to off grid, off road, off tap.
It made me realize that I should have been more diversified in my drills, in my planning, my preparation, that were similar to what people would call like a blackout drill, like in your house with your family, whatever you set up a scheduled event where you camp out in your backyard you turn off all the power and you actually have to experience what it's like to realize that your batteries are dead in the junk drawer.
You can't find the flashlights, and you don't have a first aid kit anywhere, and you don't even have any food that's easy to transport.
You don't have tubs built out that are easy to load out.
So the idea of not just not imagining it, but putting yourself through it so that you have muscle memory and you've realized where the blind spots are, and you've shored up those weaknesses.
If I could give the advice to anyone who is still in some combination of on grid, on road, on tap, whatever, I don't know if you necessarily wanna shut your water off. That's possible, but it could be there are considerations that go with that, maybe it's better just to theoretically pretend it's not on and agree not to cheat.
Figure out what would I do? How am I gonna keep my crops alive if it's the middle of the dry season and some event causes the water to stop, even for a day, sometimes that can be enough to kill everything, depending on where you are.
So the idea of on site water storage tankage that's appropriately scaled and secured, and the idea of figuring out those dynamics and those metrics of rainwater catchment capacity, flow rate, all that stuff, to have that redundancy and maybe if you don't have to, you don’t necessarily need to.
It's not like you win some award if you force yourself into that simulated austerity.
But I should have put more effort and time into saying okay, one weekend a month or one weeks out of the year, or even one month out of the year, whatever. I'm going to mock up a severe off grid, off road, off tap scenario, and I'm going to train for that possibility.
And if I care to want to one day voluntarily live off grid, off road, off tap, and have a remote bugout location, or a camping retreat or whatever you wanna call it, that it wouldn't be your first rodeo at that point so this has been my first rodeo and I've had painful lessons learned.
There's been a lot of opportunity cost and a lot of expense in the form of not capturing the free water from the sky.
I'm capturing the free photons. That's what's charging the battery on this recording device right now, and allowing me to transmit, and I do have signals, so I'm able to be online while off grid, off road, off tap, like I said, that’s dialed in.
But again, trying not to drive your loved ones crazy in the process. That's the art and science and mystique of this lifestyle.