Cutting Watering Time by 90%
A community garden in Sydney has cut its watering time from 11 hours a week to 1 hour a week thanks to WaterUps. Here’s how…
Food Security – ala growing your own food – continues to be a focus point for many families and communities – particularly with rising inflation and mortgage rates. At the same time, cost management is a concern for most individuals, government organisations and companies. Is there a better way to do things to save money and produce a better outcome?
Artarmon Parklands Community Garden is one of many community gardens around Sydney that have adopted WaterUps to save them time and money and provide optimal growing conditions for fruit and veggies.
A few years ago, WaterUps was approached to assist converting 2 large 6m x 1m old timber raised beds, that had difficulty in retaining water, into wicking beds. After these were successfully established and tested the community garden’s committee realised how much time they were saving on watering and decided to retrofit additional beds. This was made easier when the Sub-Irrigation Channels (SICs) became available.
Most veggie gardens require about 30L of water per square metre per week in summer and this water needs to be applied daily. For an average sized community garden of say 400 square metres, this means about 1,714L per day.
Without some form of automatic or self-watering system, members in this average sized community garden would spend around 17 hours a week just on watering, based on an average tap flow rate of 12L per minute. Even then, it was difficult to determine whether the garden has received the correct amount of water.
Artarmon Parklands Community Garden was able to reduce the time allocated to watering from 11 hours per week to just 1 hour and ensure adequate water supply.
Aside from community gardens, urban agricultural enterprises like Pocket City Farms and Hildasid Farm have adopted WaterUps SICs to provide more cost-effective and time-saving garden beds. The WaterUps solution also provides the added benefit of providing more optimal soil and growing conditions which improve yield — both longevity and abundance.
The success of this projects highlights the suitablity of WaterUps in a range of domestic and commercial applications to dramatically manage cost and time savings in a world challenge by rising prices, food security, climate change and urban greenery.
Cutting Watering time by 90% is something any landscaper, gardener, property developer or council would value as it correlates to massive cost savings.
