It cannot be overstated how much rain you can actually collect from a relatively small area. There are online calculators that you can use and you can type in if you have like a 50 foot by 25 foot roof. Then you’re gonna be able to harvest approximately 781 gallons of water from only one inch of rain. That’s gonna provide you with enough drinking water to get through a really extended crisis. That might even meet your irrigation needs for the year. Now, of course, if it doesn’t rain for a long period of time, that’s what your stored water supply is for.

Obviously, it’s not gonna rain everywhere. If you live in Nevada, you live in the desert, this might not be a luxury. But when you do get those rare rains, you want to try to catch as much of that water as you can. Because you don’t know when the next supply truck is coming. You don’t know when the next time it’s gonna rain. So rain catchment should be at the top of your priority list. And it’s as simple as getting a few of these barrels, throwing them somewhere in the garage, in the yard. You might not even be using them on a regular basis.

Just have them just in case. And there’s a variety of different options for storing rainwater from 1,000 liter totes to rain barrels like this. In terms of purification or making it drinkable, go and watch this video here where we explain a step-by-step process to do this on the cheap. I’m gonna tell you a little bit about the setup that we devised here. Basically, we have this 2,000 liters, if I’m not mistaken. So in terms of gallons, it’s about 500 gallons. It fills up really quick. Right now, it’s full. We just had a really big rainstorm over the weekend.

The reason why I went with this color is because black is what a lot of people will recommend because black is going to make sure that algae doesn’t develop inside like these white water totes that we have. White is not good for that particular reason because of course that means algae can grow and that might potentially negatively affect your food. If you’re using it for irrigation and obviously you don’t want to be drinking that as well. So I was concerned because this is right in direct sunlight that black would be too warm water. So if we’re using this to irrigate plants, that could potentially be detrimental for it.

Plants are used to rain water which is usually not cold but not hot either. I’m very reluctant to put hot water on plants. So this blue is a nice happy medium color. Lower risk of algae, you can leave this out all season and it’s also not going to make that water so hot that you can’t actually use it for irrigation purposes. What we’ve done here is incredibly simple. We basically just took some gutters that we’ve got from Home Depot. We screw them on to the exterior of the greenhouse. The only real red green part of this job is the tape which ensures that there’s no gap in between the gutter and the greenhouse.

I believe we used some Flex Seal for part of this. And that just basically ensures that the water isn’t going in between the gutter. So it’s all being trapped. Water doesn’t need much of an incline in order to find its way to round zero. And of course you have to make sure that your tank is below the grade of the gutter system. So we have this on both sides. So we’re making sure that we’re getting all the coverage. I believe it’s around 1,500 square feet. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to pump this into the greenhouse utilizing an on demand pump that I’ve yet to set up.

I bought a water transfer pump but the thing I don’t like about that is that you have to turn it on every time and I want something where all I’m going to have to do is basically push the nozzle and we’re going to be able to use this. And for the time being we’re just going to be doing hand watering. We’re not going to be plumbing this into our irrigation system. At some point I may actually do that. The more hands free it can be, the better. If we have an emergency with our well pump, having something like this as a backup is a no brainer, really.

It’s a one and done, it’s a super simple job and anybody can do it. The rainwater is better than the groundwater we get here. In the surrounding regions there’s a lot of agricultural activity and they tend to spray their crops with all kinds of stuff, pesticides, herbicides. And so all of that stuff is leeching into the water supply. In our house we have filtration systems to deal with that. However, out here the plants are getting the water directly from the well which means that they’re taking in a lot of that stuff. Which potentially could contaminate the food supply.

There’s nothing better for plants than rainwater, that is after all, how they evolved. The most expensive thing here was this, which is not necessary. You could use 1,000 liter totes, the only problem is algae buildup. But you could also find these things used, I think these were about 600 bucks a pop. I wanted to have it high enough that we could have gravity assist in the flow into the greenhouse. But low enough that we would maximize the catching of rainwater. Because if it’s too high then that means we have to move our rain catchment up. If it’s low into the ground then you’re going to be reliant solely on a pump in order to get that out.

We’ll show you what it looks like on the other side. These windows automatically open and close. They somewhat restrict our ability to do something like this. So we had to make sure they were under the windows. But above the grade of the top of this thing to make sure that the water could flow in. Again, this barely cost anything. I think these are 10, 15 bucks each or something like that, not a whole lot of money. And we opted for the plastic, it’s lighter weight. If I could I would have got transparent ones. Because that would have had less restriction on the sunlight going into the greenhouse.

But it’s only like a few inches of obscurity. Yeah, so this is where we’re going to take the water from. We could take the water from the top too but this is going to allow us to utilize gravity. So this is a two inch spout. So we’re going to have to use a reducer down to one inch garden hose. And then we’re just going to plumb that into the greenhouse and grow a lot of stuff. Let’s go check out and see how the greenhouse is doing. It’s been about maybe a month or so since you guys seen it last.

And I’m telling you, it’s a jungle in there. Alright guys, so as a person who’s never had a greenhouse before, I can’t believe that it’s not even July yet when we’re making this video. It’s June 30th today. There’s a lot of things that are already producing. It’s incredible. So that means that with this greenhouse, I could get two cycles of growing seasons. Had I started earlier than I did, which is amazing. You can see these tomato plants are massive. We got romas. We got beef steaks. We got all kinds of cherry tomatoes. You name it.

We got it. We’re using strings. We have this trellis system here and a combination of sticks, but it is a jungle in here. And for the first time ever, I can see the gardening in Canada in your face because I think my tomato plants are going to be bigger than hers this year. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. We got some bush beans. We got some pole beans. Our onions are already massive. Take a look at that. Isn’t that incredible? These are some Spanish onions. So we’re hoping to get some really good onion harvest this year.

We got some cherry tomatoes, which are, you know, this plant is on its tail end of life, but these things are delicious. We got our celery, which is totally taken off. We got herb gardens. We got some mini squash. We got some sweet potato in here. Every herb you can imagine. The hell is that? Get off of there, you bastard. Fucking grasshoppers. We got our green peppers that are coming in. I think we got a lot of hybrid varieties because we just have a whole bunch of different types of peppers in here. They’re doing pretty good.

They’re not as big, as tall as I would have expected, but they’re doing all right. All right, so a lot of these fruit trees, we’re going to be putting these in the orchard, but I want to give them a fair go. We actually already had cherries go red in here, and we’ve actually already picked a whole tree, and that was about a week ago. So it just goes to show that you can accelerate the growing season for some of these things in this controlled climate. So eventually, all these trees, most of them anyways, are going to be going into the orchard.

We put some flowers in here for pollinators because we have these now, and these flowers are just exploding, as you can see. We got a couple varieties of beets. So we got some cauliflower. We got some broccoli that I think I wasn’t supposed to let go to flower. I’m going to have to ask the redhead about that when I see her next time. We got some big, big carrots. I’m confident now that we can do two rounds of all the foods that you’re seeing here, we could extend our growing season by at least three months, about a month and a half on each end.

And if we had a heating system in here, we’re going to have a wood stove, then we could even probably extend that into November, possibly. Strawberries are still kind of finding their place, but next year, this is just going to be a dense thicket of strawberries. We’ve got watermelons, cantaloupes in here. Those ones taking a little bit longer. And we decided to put some pumpkins back here, and they’re already getting quite big underneath here. Our apricots are getting bigger. The ones in here are doing way better than the ones in our orchard. The ones in our orchard, they’ve had to endure hail this year.

They’ve had to endure rather erratic conditions. It was very dry for a while, and then it got really wet for a while. It’s been colder than usual for certain periods and hotter than usual. So it’s just been inconsistent. So for that reason, these ones are doing A-OK. I don’t want to disturb that by putting it out there. They’re nice and sheltered in here. They get a good breeze. So we’re trying to see exactly what we can achieve in here before we bump this outside. Where it might become a problem is if we extend the growing season too long in here, then these things are not going to have the opportunity to overwinter, because they are zone two and zone three.

They need to be exposed to that cold air come September. And if we deprive them of that, then that might affect how they produce next year, I presume. As you guys know, over the years, I’m no green thumb or expert. I’ve tried gardening in a variety of different microclimates, and this by far has been the most effective. Here in Canada, where we have a short growing season, we absolutely need a greenhouse to extend it, possibly do double harvests, and it’s just incredible. It was worth every ounce of sweat equity invested. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com, where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk, and no gimmicks.

Use discount code preppinggear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].

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