Thanks for your notes, everyone! Later on I'll send out some other calculations I received, in case it's helpful to anyone. J
Abby From: Richard Menn [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2011 12:42 PM To: Cocke, Abby Cc: Guy Serbin; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Community_garden] water usage Guy Serbin's advice is right on target. If you need to come up with a quick estimate of total water usage for planning or reporting purposes, try this: Calculate the amount of water needed to cover an area the size of the garden to the depth of 1.5 inches once a week for 26 weeks. A gallon contains 231 cubic inches of water. Therefore, one inch of rainfall or irrigation for each square foot of garden would equal 0.62 gallon, and 1.5 inches would make it a bit less than a whole gallon. So let's say that a well-mulched garden of 1,000 square feet would require, at most, some 900 gallons of water per week from some combination of rainfall and supplemental irrigation. (If these figures leave you scratching your head, I'll be happy to talk further off-list.) Assuming that an inch or more of rain will fall on the garden each week during April and May, as is usual for your area, then you will probably need to do little additional watering in the spring beyond what's required to get seedlings and new transplants established. Just follow Guy's recommendations for calculating your supplemental water needs for the rest of the season (primarily mid-June to mid-September). Summing up: estimate your total water consumption for 26 weeks, subtract the rainfall, and you'll have a rough idea of what you'll need to supply via irrigation over the course of the season. Of course, deep, infrequent watering (preferably early in the day) and thick mulches of chopped fall leaves, dried grass clippings and/or straw are essential ingredients in the whole process. Guy Serbin wrote: Abby, That would vary based upon climate, crop, gardener experience, irrigation technology, maintenance, etc. As such, I wouldn't use irrigation data from anywhere outside of your area unless it had a comparable climate. A first start would be to put in place water meters on any irrigation systems and then keep a log of irrigation usage at regular intervals. As for precipitation, you'd need to use weather station data or NEXRAD precipitation data to estimate that unless the farms have on-site stations. Some of the larger community farms in the Baltimore area may have some data on that, e.g., the Kayam Farm at the Pearlstone Center in Reisterstown, MD, but I don't know if the smaller ones, e.g., the Whitelock Community Farm in Reservoir Hill, does. Sincerely, Guy Serbin On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Cocke, Abby <[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]> wrote: I was wondering if anyone had any figures on how much water their garden uses... per quarter, per year, anything like that? Thanks! 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