Topic: Do you water all your veg from your water butts?

[kippers garden]

This may sound a daft question but i have read a magazine article that has totally confused me!...

Can you water all your veg with water from a water butt (ie rain water)  or do some vegetables need fresh water from the tap?

What do you all do...fresh or rain water?

[glow777]

Rain water

don't want the tap water chemicals on my plants!  that and the fact we havent got a tap on the lottie!

[Mrs Ava]

Aha, was that Bob Flowerpoos article in Kitchen Garden mag?  I read it and laughed out loud!  How on earth am I - along with the other trillion allotmenteers who have no piped clean tap water on their site supposed to water seedlings if we aren't supposed to use water butt water?  I use collected rain water, always have, same in my greenhouse to no ill effects.  I do ensure the butts are clean  :o and the water isn't stagnant.  What I tend to do it make a seed drill, water that, wait 5 mins for the water to soak in, if the ground is very dry, do it a second time, then sow, then cover and that is it.  With emerging seedlings, if things are looking bleak on the rain front and the seedlings are failing fast, then I will water, but I do it with care trying to miss the foliage as I don't want scorching and have frazzled far to many seedlings that way.

[saddad]

I use the Butts when and where poss, but the one by the Poly always runs out, cant work out  how to harvest the rain from that sloping roof! Then use taps if needed. Our site has water pipes, no plot is mroe than five plots from a standpipe.  :)

[Robert_Brenchley]

What on earth would they need tap water for? What do you think they get falling from the sky, nicely chlorinated superhygeinic drinking water?

[Mrs Ava]

Meester Flowerpoo says that the bacterias etc living in the dirty water butts will cause alsorts of problems including damping off of the seedlings.  In his ideal world where he can turn on a tap and water his seedlings, then all good and dandy, but for those of us without taps, butts it is!

[kippers garden]

Exactly right Emma-Jane..i read it in Kitchen Garden mag...you obviously read the same article.

[tim]

Fresh water, Kipper? You mean the 'previous user' stuff from the tap, produced at great expense?

For me it means rain water - full of goodness. Just see how things perk up after rain - despite having been 'hosed' for ages?

'Dirty' butts? I would happily drink ours!

If you're worried, a touch of pot permang will sort everything out.

[thomasb]

I was a bit concerned with using water I had collected in butts for watering small seedlings in my cold-frame. This was because at the time I had no lid on the water-butts and the water was going green. Since I put lids on the butts a few weeks ago the water appears to have recovered and looks clean again.
When the water in butts has been collected in clean butts and where you can prevent light from encouraging algae from growing, then I would have no problems with using it.

Thomas

[Robert_Brenchley]

Always keep butts covered; I had an algal bloom one year, followed by a plague of midges. very Biblical, except the water turned green not red, and thoroughly unpleasant.

[mat]

This was also "reported" in Grow Your own magazine... because there is a company who is trying to sell us a £134 item to remove the chlorine from our tap water to make it safe for gardens... excuse me?  ::)  I will be sticking to my well/butt water...

mat

[Robert_Brenchley]

Someone should tell these people that chlorine evaporates if you leave water to stand.

[artichoke]

I have an old bath on my plot and the water goes red, probably because leaves fall into it and rot (and today I found a dead sparrow - but I do have a branch for toads etc to clamber out along). I have a limnologist husband, and he said red water was poisonous for plants. I am not easily convinced, so I spent a couple of weeks offering red water to an assortment of local weeds, none of which died or appreciably slowed down.

A more useful thing he said was that if you stir the water occasionally, it oxygenates it and the red disappears, and I have found that to be true. Unfortunately the bath is almost used up, so I shall have to resort to tapwater carried up to the plot, as there are no standpipes at all.

I do agree with Tim that a shower of rain seems to do more for the plants than 100 waterings, but NOT that I would drink the water from this bath - I don't even like to wash my hands in it.

[Robert_Brenchley]

Sounds like red algae. A bloom like that uses up all the oxygen in the water and kills fish, and as I discovered, provides an ideal food sourve for midge larvae.