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Love veg, hate watering cans

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Last Post by EtchedPixels 16 minutes ago

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Majordennisbloodnok

(@majordennisbloodnok)

Famed Member Moderator

Joined: 5 years ago

Posts: 2035

Topic starter 01/08/2026 12:46 pm [#3121]

Another year, another drought. My wife and I have been looking pretty seriously into how we can keep our home grown veg watered without resorting to watering cans.

Historically, we’ve had quite a few water butts dotted around to the extent we have a store of up to 800 litres of useable rainwater (discounting the dregs you can never get out). That is sufficient at a stretch to keep the veg watered for about a week, but the prospect of month long dry spells becoming more normal means we felt we had to do something. In addition, our last few years have seen OK onions, carrots, spuds etc. but we haven’t had the time to get out and watering manually often enough to keep up with demand.

Our first step has been to get a water butt pump. Brilliant. That on its own cut down the effort and time needed for doing a thorough watering. However, it was obvious a lot of that precious water was getting wasted so our next step was to get a lot of soaker hose and a job lot of connectors so we could lay soaker hose on each separate bed. Another game changer. Now we can connect the pump to a hose, the other end of the hose to a soaker and leave it for half an hour as it slowly targets a good amount of water where it’s needed with minimal evaporation.

All well and good, but we still ran out of rainwater a while back so, whilst we can still legally use the soaker hose with mains water we’ve decided we’re going to get three more water tanks - each about 800 litres - to increase our store. We’ve seen we can connect them all together so we can use a pump from just one location, and my next plans are to run semi permanently some hose to a manifold and then to each of the beds so we don’t have to keep trogging the hose all over the place. Final step will be some solenoid valves hooked up to Home Assistant, but that’s a way off yet.

What has surprised me is just how much of all this is pretty cheap. The tanks are, of course, a big investment but as long as you avoid the big brand names things like soaker hose are way better than I expected.

Since this is still all work in progress, I’m very open to ideas and everyone else’s experiences. How are the green fingered amongst you managing?

This topic was modified 2 hours ago by Majordennisbloodnok

105 m2 bungalow in South East England
Mitsubishi Ecodan 8.5 kW air source heat pump
18 x 360W solar panels
1 x 6 kW GroWatt battery and SPH5000 inverter
1 x Myenergi Zappi
1 x VW ID3
Raised beds for home-grown veg and chickens for eggs

"Semper in excretia; sumus solum profundum variat"

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EtchedPixels

(@etchedpixels)

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Joined: 2 months ago

Posts: 136

01/08/2026 2:10 pm

Living in Wales helps we also keep our garden as a wildlife garden so the water loss is much lower as we've got no lawn and everything has a good depth of ground cover around anything we grow. Dehumidifier, heatpump tumble drier and aircon water all goes into the water butts. Would be nice to use grey water better but it's tricky as a listed building, especially one with victorian plumbing where bits of it reflect the idea of separating waste water and sewerage hadn't yet caught on.

Probably should start keeping the plug in the bath afterwards and then using the water on the plants.

Tomatoes are in the conservatory (it's useless for anything but capturing heat and in summer being a greenhouse) and are doing ridiculously well.

Seriously considering sticking old solar panels "temporarily" over the beds each spring-autumn if this kind of weather or worse becomes the new normal. Might even wire them up.

This post was modified 16 minutes ago by EtchedPixels

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