Smart design solutions for a water-scarce garden!
Wicking Beds!
Raised beds that are irrigated from the bottom up so you don't lose any water to evaporation, your roots are encouraged to grow deep, AND you can store water in the bottom of the beds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF7N_ECNvAg&feature=related
...a whole bunch of other You Tube videos on wicking beds of other designs....
What a great design for raised beds in the community garden at the hospital!
Our water source is tricky: a 60m run to the hospital either for access to municipal water from their spigot, or any rainwater that we might be able to collect. Thoughts were to fill a big cistern near the garden every couple of weeks, and use the stored water in our gardens....but it's a lot of work, and big cisterns can be expensive, so what if we stored our water in the bottom of our garden beds!
Lots of different ways use the concept of a wicking bed with different materials that might be available to us...lets get creative!!! ...buckets, gravel, wood mulch, weeping tile, old garden hoses....any other ideas?
Global Buckets
Uses the same concept of water-wise bottom irrigation but uses recycled 5 gallon buckets...cheap, upcycled material, and small enough for a balcony/deck/rooftop/ indoor garden.... This design comes from to 14 year-olds!
http://www.globalbuckets.org/
The coolest thing here is how they've linked all the buckets together with a siphon-system so that you only need to irrigate in one place...imagine we hooked all of the wicking beds in the community garden together with the same technique, so that we had a system of self-watering gardens!
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