Rainwater

[ncboman]

How many of you guys save and use it?

article (http://www.farmersalmanac.com/home-garden/2010/06/14/wait-catch-that-rain/)

[Bill Gunn]

I use 1/4 of the water that falls on my barn roof to keep our 25' X 25' 11,000 gallon koi pond full. Works great !!

http://pic90.picturetrail.com/VOL2250/777751/2236628/66237764.jpg

http://pic90.picturetrail.com/VOL2250/777751/2236628/151822257.jpg

[Rock Chuck]

In a roundabout way and as a community project. Most of our rainfall is in the mountains. We save it in reservoirs for summer irrigation. With only 7" of precip a year, we'll sometimes go for several months in a row with none at all.

I've read about towns that save rainwater. Some have made it illegal for homeowners to save what they call 'city water' as that reduces the water that accumulates in city reservoirs. They'll have a hard time convincing me that water that falls from a free ranging sky is owned by any 'city'.

[ncboman]

Bill,

You've got a real nice place. Does your pond freeze solid in winter?

[Bill Gunn]

It tries to, but I keep a big bubbler going to keep a hole in the ice. If you don't, all the vegetation rots under the ice, using up all the oxygen in the water, and kills the fish.
The bubbler puts oxygen in the water, and the hole it makes lets out all the methane gas generated by the rotten vegetation.

Some of the koi are now over 30 inches long...

http://pic90.picturetrail.com/VOL2250/777751/2236628/151822836.jpg

http://pic90.picturetrail.com/VOL2250/777751/2236628/151822268.jpg

http://pic90.picturetrail.com/VOL2250/777751/2236628/151822249.jpg


The place here ain't that great, just an old farm house built in 1866.

We try to make it look nice, but it's getting harder to keep up with it....

[ncboman]

Rock,

I've read about that and can't really relate to the western states per water. I know people have been killed over it out there in the past.

I have several 55gal drums for gutter fed rainwater around my barns. I use the water for hand watering seedling trees and garden crops. They all went dry this past week (unusual) but we got some rain this evening. I haven't looked yet to see how much the barrels collected.

[Rock Chuck]

There's a rule of thumb for western farmers/ranchers:
You can mess with my cattle, you can mess with my wife, but you keep your damn hands off my water.

When a commodity is scarce, it becomes valuable. So. Idaho has millions of acres of sagebrush, as do many other western states. A good percentage of it is good farmland, but there's no water to farm it. Right now, the state of Idaho has issued more water rights than there is water. By law, the older rights have precedence. The senior rights get 100% of their quota before the junior rights get any.
There's a move to shut down some of the ground water pumpers because all the pumping has depleted the aquifer. Much of the ground water appears on the surface through springs and the rights to those is held by others. The water flow of the springs has diminished considerably and is affecting the older rights of those who use them. It could get ugly before it's over.

This area was settled right after 1900 when congress passed the Cary Act that opened the land to homesteading. The most famous favorite son here isn't a congressman, senator, or soldier. It's a guy named I. B. Perrine who was instrumental in developing a canal system to get water to the land. Without his efforts, much of so. Idaho wouldn't exist.

[Bushman]

We take fresh water so much for granted here in the Midwest and from reading that people in other parts of the country save rainwater, I know that we shouldn't. All of the fresh water for lots of eastern WI. gets piped over from Lake Michigan and while Minnesota has "Land of 10,000 lakes" printed on their license plates, someone counted and found out that Wisconsin has even more.

Bill, don't the raccoons, mink or the otters get your fish in the pond when you aren't looking? I've got my own little lake up north and I put 500 rainbow trout in there one year. It turned into a smörgåsbord for the otters when several of them walked over from a near by trout stream.

[Bill Gunn]

The only thing that bothers ponds regularly around here is the Great Blue Herons. Thats why my pond drops off to an immediate depth of 5 1/2 feet.
In the 13 years I've had it, they did get one 16" koi of mine, and a lot of goldfish. I took all the goldfish out and the Herons don't come around much any more.
My neighbor had a 1.5' deep pond completely emptied out of about 35 goldfish and koi in 2 days that he wasn't home last summer.
He figured that because the pond was within 15' of the house, they'd stay away... Not So...

I did see an otter in the swamp in the woods across the street a few weeks ago. If he finds my pond, I might as well fill it in with dirt !!

[dave-t.]

Great pond Bill.

Rain barrels are pretty much a joke around here. If you get a good rain, the barrel will be overflowing well before it stops. MO has so much water though. Rivers, springs, plenty of rain, and wells all over, even as shallow as 6-10' deep. I have some hippy/green type friends that bought into the rain barrels whole hog, and got rid of them soon after. Too much rain to catch, even with drains between 3 barrels off of each gutter down spout. They thought it was a waste for our part of the world where we really only need to water mid July-late Aug in most years. Not enough water to get through the summer dry spell, and too much water the rest of the time.

We were about to buy some barrels at our place (house and 3 out buildings to catch water from), but our friends talked us out of them.

[Rock Chuck]

The only thing that bothers ponds regularly around here is the Great Blue Herons. ...
My hunting partner used to run a number of commercial trout farms. The herons really gave him fits. A heron will spear a fish and if it's too big to swallow, it'll just spit it out and try another fish. In a commercial pond, all the fish are the same size. If a heron gets in a pond of small ones, he'll eat his fill and leave. However, if he gets in a pond of big ones that are all too big to swallow, he'll just stand there all day long spearing and dropping fish. He can kill and waste a BUNCH of them in a few hours.

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

Put in a Piranha Pond for the Herons. Maybe an alligator or two.

Alan