Just What I Needed

Storm came, most of it wrapped up by 9am leaving my frantically observing it's demise on the increasingly colorless Doppler images; I would have loved a full day of rain.  Interestingly, I received just about the exact amount of rain I needed to fill my rain water containers.  As I mentioned Yesterday I calculated .82" was needed and it looks like we received .88".

Blue sky :|

Hitting your number is nice, but my strategy was nonetheless flawed; I was considering the sum of capacity using a formula that assumes equal distribution across all the containers - but they aren't all the same size (of course) nor do they present a collection area equally proportionate to their capacity.  This means the little ones were overflowing and the big ones remained unsatisfied.  The required rainfall was still correct but I would have needed to dump the smaller vessels into the larger ones to fill everything up.  Oh well, all the more reason for a catch tank and gutter setup.

Finally at 12:30 I couldn't deny the fact that the storm had passed and the sun was out.  I was tired of sitting on my ass writing code anyway so I went out and checked on the farm and worked bed EW3 (reformed, weeded, added 3" compost, level).  The bed is now ready for a crop, although I'm not sure what I will do.  I could do more spinach, peas, lettuce - but I've done carrots and chard.  Gonna research if there are any other cool season crops I may want to do over there.

BedWork 2012 (!)

After 8 months of nothing

30 minutes of weeding, rake-forming, amending and leveling

All Be Damned...

Capturing rain water actually makes sense, I was able to collect more than 35 gallons from a combined 2/5th of an inch of rain off of one small patio cover.  I figured out the math to determine my total potential based on my "collectible roof area" and my region's annual average rainfall.  For this post I will just use said patio cover for the  example.

• The patio measures 17'W x 11'D for an area of 187 sq. ft. or 26,928 sq. in.
• The average rainfall in my zipcode (92866) is 12.6".
• 1 gallon is equal to 231 cu. in.
• If you take the roof area of 26,928 sq. in. multiplied by the average rainfall of 12.6" you get a whopping 339,293 cu. in. of annual water hitting that roof.
• Divide that by the 231 cu. in. in a gallon and you end up with a juicy 1,468.8 gallons a year off that one little patio cover!

Using the ~2/5" of rain in the last 48 hours, I can plug that into the formula and get 46 gallons which isn't too terribly off from the 35 gallons I claim to have collected.  Factor in that I'm not collecting 100% of the runoff and I consider that to largely be a validation of the formula.

Based on that I think I may just rig up some tanks and gutters for next winter.

In other news, I harvested a couple handfulls of beans and they taste alright, nothing too exciting to be honest.  I'm hoping the cool weather is contributing to bland flavors.  I read that you should try to harvest everyday to keep the crop producing, so like a good student I'm doing as I'm told.  The tomatoes that I put in the ground look quite healthy, they've perked up a bit and, now this could be in my head, look to be deeper green in color!!