Let it Rain!

Well, today is the first day back after the long weekend and the rain is coming down! Los Angeles is an amazing place when it comes to weather. It's either perfectly sunny and gorgeous, or perfectly storming. Check out the street I cross everyday to get to my Sustainable Urban Farm. You can see the cinder block wall that I've had to put on hold. Ha ha.

Since the rain is so bad, I've been spending a lot of time in my workshop building planter boxes. The amount of wood I have found, will keep me busy for a long, long time. The rain is a blessing that is two fold.  First, for the plants and secondly, it's forcing me to focus on indoor projects.


Being curious, I decided to check the weather to see how long this storm will last. It's going to be wet for awhile.  The video at the top of today's entry has been weighing on my mind.  That is a massive amount of run off!  Rain, in theory, is cleaner and more pure than municipal water.  Why are we not using all this precious water.  All the water is really doing is scrubbing the oil and grime off the streets and running the toxic sludge into the Santa Monica Bay.  If I could somehow store the rain before it left my property, in essence it perfectly usable for almost anything, like watering an Sustainable Urban Farm.  Ha ha ha.  Seriously.


OK.  Let's see how practical this would actually be.  I water the plants every day or so, using a 2.5 gallon bucket that I fill two to three times.  That's 7.5 gallons times 365 days which equals 2,737.5 gallons per year.  The average American uses 80 to 100 gallons per day. (http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/qahome.html#HDR3)  That's 29,200 to 36,500 gallons per person per year!  CRAZY!!  The amount of water I'm using on my farm doesn't seem so bad now does it?  Especially once you figure the number of people that will be able to eat from this urban farm.


Let's go back to run off.  My apartment building is approximately 200ft by 100ft and all the water that hits the property is funneled out through gutters.  I found a site online that says for every one inch of rainfall per 1,000 square feet, 561 gallons of water accumulates. (http://rainwater.sustainablesources.com/)
My building is approximately 20,000sqft with an annual rainfall of 14 inches.  20,000sqft divided by 1,000 equals 20.  20 times 561 gallons equals 11,220 gallons per inch of rainfall.  11,220 gallons time 14 inches of annual rainfall equals 157,080 gallons of wasted water per year.  And that's just my apartment building.


The bright side is that I'm not using any water on my garden this week at all!