Hey everyone, I kinda went on hiatus for a couple of weeks... but I'm back, and would like to tell you about the drip feed fertilizing/tea setup I just got going!
So basically, I have 4 tanks in my greenhouse, for a total of about 1000 gallons of water. They are recycled stock tanks that I fiberglassed back to life!
One thing I use these tanks for is thermal mass. They are great at keeping the greenhouse warm in the fall and winter, and also regulating temp and cooling in the summer. Because of these tanks my heat bill is WAY down and I couldn't be happier.
I also use these tanks to brew tea from worm castings. The process is simple: add a few handfuls of casting, keep the water aerated, and wait a day. Then you have highly biologically active tea to add to the garden. Once it's in the garden, you keep the soil moist so the microbes can continue to reproduce.
The result is a healthy and diverse microbial living system that builds soil structure, forms symbiosis with the plants, and extracts insoluble nutrients and minerals from the soil and converts them to a plant soluble form.
In addition, once this system is healthy and in place, it removes more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces, which is a powerful way to combat climate change. It's estimated that if we put 35% of the worlds farmable land into this type of management system, we could reduce CO2 levels even with the current levels of output by industrial society.
That's pretty amazing and something I would like to work towards.
I have been using a sprayer to hand spray my crops with these teas, but I finally got my simple pump system set up, and here it is:
This is the small hydroponics pump i use to move the water down to the field. I just submerge it in the tank and then it starts the siphon and helps with the pressure.
I run a filter to keep sediment out of the drip irrigation system.
Here is the line running to the field. The field is about 250' away and about a 12' elevation drop. I use graduated line sizes to increase the pressure as the water flows downhill. The first is 1 1/2", followed by 1", and finally 1/2" into my drip irrigation system.
That's basically it! This system seems to work well and today I ran it into about 1000' of drip tape without issue. Pressure seemed decent... just guessing by pressing my thumb against the line I would say somewhere around 20psi.
Took a while to procure all the different fittings I needed but everything was available at the local hardware store and hydroponics store.
I am also planning to fertilize with this system. It's just so much faster and more efficient than walking around with a sprayer.
Another thing this system is capable of: I can turn on the water to my drip system, and this moves water back up the hill to refill the tanks. This is from a different well, and It can serve as backup if one of the well pumps were to fail.
If you have any questions or liked this article, please feel free to comment below or upvote! Thanks