Water Batteries

The term "water battery" may or may not be the technical term for what I have been creating in our backyard permaculture landscape, however the phrase accurately describes the function of what it is. A battery is a tool that can hold a charge to be released sometime at a later date, and what I have created in the yard is a system designed to "charge" with water that can then be released into the surrounding soil during a dry spell. In the mid-Atlantic region, we tend to get a decent amount of rainfall throughout the year. Long stretches of time can and do occur without rain, however. This is especially true during the summer months. In the past year, there was a drought that was felt by gardens all around our home. We struggled to keep our plants alive and were forced to rely on city water. It is for this reason that having a system in place to capture excess rainfall and hold it for a later time is such an essential part of regenerative gardening/farming.

"Water Battery" Walking Paths

So many of us were raised to rely on the garden hose which is an extremely limited solution for an issue that most gardeners encounter constantly throughout every year. During the summer months, it is completely expected that a gardener will go out and run the hose for 30 minutes or so every night. Sometimes this goes on for weeks at a time! Not only is this habit very expensive, but it is also wasteful of both your time and water. Add to all this the additional factor that, for those of us with city water, you are using treated drinking water on the plants, and the whole concept starts to sound downright ridiculous. For years, I had always assumed the best method for providing our own water was a rain barrel. I finally bought one a few years ago and hooked it up. It became immediately evident that there was a major increase in the amount of time it took to water the garden. What used to take 30 minutes to soak the soil with the hose turned into more than an hour of walking back and forth just to barely wet the base of the plants. Even worse, the 50 gallons of rainwater would be used up within a couple of days. Naturally, I started dreaming about adding more rain barrels and then began stressing over how I would ever find the time to get the water spread over the gardens.

We did at one point inherit a 100ft hose that we can hook up to the rain barrel nozzle and with the help of the kids and the slight hill of my yard, I can use gravity to water the garden much quicker. This was a huge improvement to my problem, but it still had some issues. I couldn't water any of the gardens that were uphill from the rain barrel this way, and I couldn't reach the farthest gardens in the yard. And don't forget that nothing had changed about the limited quantity of water I was working with. With the added convenience of the hose, those 50 gallons were used up in a day easily. As I started to dive deeper into permaculture, it became strikingly obvious that it was time to turn this whole situation on its head and rethink my options. I was learning so much about swales and retention ponds, but on a 1/4-acre property, much of that was difficult to apply. We are fortunate to have a slight hill as I stated earlier, which allows us to use gravity to our advantage, however I needed a more personalized and small-scale approach.

The solution that we finally settled on was to focus less on above-ground water storage and more on storing the water in the ground. Organic matter has an amazing ability to hold up to ten times its weight in water making it an excellent ally in the garden bed. The timing couldn't have been more perfect this past year when our beautiful old maple tree had to be taken down. The pile of wood chips that were left behind in our backyard was daunting, but I was thrilled to have it. The wood chips were used as mulch all throughout the property and the water batteries I am here to speak about were born.

In the main vegetable bed, my husband and I have always had a feud over the walking paths. I have a tendency to make the paths too small in my attempt to cram as many plants as possible into the garden. He can't find the paths and therefore can't help me much in the garden because he is constantly getting in trouble for stepping on the plants. Overall, the garden has been a beautiful but unorganized. This year is going to be so different! During the early stages of my spring fever when it was still too cold to do actual real gardening, I gave the veggie beds a makeover! We decided to make uniform, 3 ft wide rows that would have plenty of space for a variety of plants. The pathways are 18 inches wide to allow ample space for walking. Now that the paths and beds have been widened, there are less paths than there were before. The result is a similar amount of square footage in the garden beds with easier access for people!

Our rows have always been arranged perpendicular to the slope. This is important when designing a garden because it slows the runoff and gives it time to soak down into the soil right beside your plants. For the water batteries, I took a shovel and dug the walking paths down about a foot deep and 18 inches wide. I threw the soil I was removing onto the adjacent bed. After years of growing food in this space and improving the soil, the beds looked amazing with the black fluffy dirt I was excavating from the paths laid out on top. Once this step was completed, I took the mulch from our tree and filled in these ditches so that they were almost level with the beds. I wanted them to be slightly lower than the garden beds to encourage the water to flow down into the paths and soak into the mulch. When it rains now, the pathways of this garden have an amazing capacity to hold water. This was done with a permaculture mindset in which every working component in your life has multiple functions. The pathways are also the water batteries! Even though not much time has passed for observation, I have seen a noticeable difference in the amount of time it takes for the beds to dry out. Even after several sunny breezy days, just below the surface of the soil, it is still damp to the touch. I expect as my veggies fill out and cover the surface of these beds that the amount of time required to water them this summer will be diminished!

When we attempt to fill the role of nature and do her jobs manually, we eventually hit a brick wall. No human has enough time to spend doing the work she does for us daily for free. Many have tried and failed to replace her, and they often feel as if they must choose either to give up, or to fall back on unsustainable and harmful shortcuts in their lives. They may not realize that there is a third option where we can recreate the natural systems that are in place on Earth and sit back to admire them as they work. Water batteries are a way of doing this third option. Nature doesn't hold water in barrels and distribute it two gallons at a time throughout the forest. Organic matter in the form of mulch, packed into walking paths alongside the plants is similar to ripples in the natural landscape that fill with sticks and leaves. The natural mulch breaks down with the help of fungi that moves into these damp places, increasing their water retention capabilities. Plants take root here and thrive throughout the dry months, living off of the abundance of moisture stored in the soil. By setting the stage for a similar biome right at home in our gardens, we can take a step back and watch as the magic of the forest floor takes place before our eyes. No more hauling a watering can all around the yard for hours on end!