Help! Water, water everywhere ...but..

[Steve-0]

Not the right stuff. I live in a high mountain desert with 8" annual precip. Rain is well like in a desert. Also illegal to collect...can you believe that? Even on my own property.

So my quandary and question is: After rainwater what is the best source? I have snow melt creeks and am using them now. Also irrigation canals in the neighborhood ...it is very gray with clay silt. so avoiding that ATM. Next is spring water. I read about fears of water and soil borne bacteria killing cacti. Great!

My tap is softened with salt pellets otherwise it's hard with too many minerals.

Suggestions, please & thank you.

[SoilSifter]

You haven't added location info to your profile but if I remember correctly you're in Utah. This article by the USU extension might be of interest to you. https://extension.usu.edu/waterquality/ ... n-Utah.pdf Seems like you actually can collect rainwater in Utah with some conditions. Or, perhaps there is something specific to your location that is stopping you.

I'm in Idaho. Like you I have hard water from hydrants outside and the house has soft water which is made by adding salt pellets. I collect water runoff from the roof of the house. A few times I've taken a few buckets of water from a nearby ditch for watering my cacti though I'm not sure if that is completely legal. Someone called me once and told me I shouldn't do that. Though the property where the cacti are located has water rights. Seems like doing that should be OK. I expect your canal/ditch water to be great for watering the cacti even with the silt but I don't know if you legally have access to it. I wouldn't expect spring water to be a problem if it isn't unusually warm which might cause odd microbes to grow in it and it doesn't have any problematic minerals in it. However, getting the spring water might be a lot of hassle.

Years ago when I began growing cacti and succulents I was using local sand and watering with hard water. Some cacti seemed to have issues, so suspecting my local sand and water wasn't helping, I eventually transitioned to a different potting mix and using collected rain water when possible. However, sometimes I run out of collected water and using hard water seems to not be a problem.

[Steve Johnson]

My tap is softened with salt pellets otherwise it's hard with too many minerals.

Suggestions, please & thank you.

I've been acidifying the tap water for my collection since 2012, and here's a presentation that might be useful to you:

http://www.cactiguide.com/forum/viewtop ... 25&t=43525

TimN provided a good tip on using citric acid instead of 5% white vinegar, so if vinegar isn't practical given the amount of water you need for your cacti, you should be fine with citric acid.

[Steve-0]

Thanks for the replies.

Updated my profile - location: Salt Lake Valley, Utah - southern end


Thanks for the link on rainwater collection.

Apparently, rainwater collecting IS legal now that I looked into since the last time 8 or 9 years ago. The law was amended in 2013. 2500 gallons may be collected per year. More than enough. Guess I might install a rain barrel or two. I may get enough for cactus use.

Our regular lawn and garden water is irrigation, non-culinary sourced. The monthly bill is ~$30 per month all year long. The water is turned on and off by the city. On April 15th, off October 15th. Billed monthly regardless of amount used. We had culinary lawn watering years ago when we first moved here from back east. During May-Sept it is not uncommon to run up $300-$500 monthly bills depending on the amount of sod lawn is in place and size of lot. So $360 annual water bill or $1200 for 4 months was easy.

I suppose this sprinkler system could be a source of cactus water...it's the same stuff as the canal. Gray and clay silty. But not the treated hard water.

My main concern is the possibility of harmful microbes and bacteria present in the spring, creek, pond, lake or canal water killing my cactus when there is no rainwater to collect.

[mikethecactusguy]

Hi
Just found this about Utah
Rainwater harvested is allowed on land owned or leased by the person responsible for the collection. Additional regulations exist, according to Senate Bill 32, depending on if a person is registered with the Division of Water Resources or not. A person who is registered may store no more than 2,500 gallons of rainwater, and a person who is unregistered may use no more than two containers at 100 gallons or less per container.

[Steve-0]

Hi
Just found this about Utah
Rainwater harvested is allowed on land owned or leased by the person responsible for the collection. Additional regulations exist, according to Senate Bill 32, depending on if a person is registered with the Division of Water Resources or not. A person who is registered may store no more than 2,500 gallons of rainwater, and a person who is unregistered may use no more than two containers at 100 gallons or less per container.

Yep, there's plenty for sale via Water Pro, city utility, but limiting regulations to the free stuff that falls from the sky on my private property/.

That's why I pays my taxes, right?

[SoilSifter]

My main concern is the possibility of harmful microbes and bacteria present in the spring, creek, pond, lake or canal water killing my cactus when there is no rainwater to collect.

If your cacti are healthy and uninjured I expect canal water to work as well for cacti as it works for watering all the other kinds of plants and crops. Sometimes where I live the irrigation district/company tells people to not use water from a canal because they are demossing which I think is done by adding a chemical to the water. If you are really concerned about microbes in the water then I guess distilled water would be the safest. I don't think the jugs of distilled water sold at stores is guaranteed to be sterile (it isn't assumed to be sterile when used for plant tissue culture purposes) but certainly doesn't make people sick when drunk and it would have minimal if any microbes. I actually use distilled water for starting cactus seeds and watering cactus seedlings. I wouldn't expect there to be any issues with using spring, creek, pond, or lake water either for watering mature healthy cacti but I've never tried those sources of water so perhaps I shouldn't say much about it in case there is some issue I haven't considered. This is just my non-expert opinion but I don't think plants are very bothered by microbes in their water.

[Steve-0]

Thanks again. I only have concerns about icky stuff in water sources because of reading on here about bacteria, microbes, pathogens and other kinds of cactus killing germs in water other than rain. Probably read too much into it and worked myself into a frazzle. I mean for nearly ten years I watered the few I had and they lived in peat potting soil with minimal perlite and they're still going along. So I'll use what I can get and just avoid the tapwater.

[DaveW]

The water companies in the UK charge us for getting rid of rainwater if we divert it into their sewers rather than use soakaways to loose it into the ground. We can catch all we want and are encouraged to use it to water plants in case there is a tap water shortage in a dry summer. I believe our farmers can be regulated in extracting water from streams or rivers for irrigation purposes, but they would be extracting hundreds if not thousands of gallons, far more than a householder therefore could severely limit a small streams flow.

I would have thought when watering plants the soil would filter out a lot of pathogens before it reached the roots? In Egypt they rely on the Nile flooding to enrich the soil for the next years crops and that is hardly water you would want to drink untreated.

[Steve-0]

Amazing....The Southwest US is experiencing a Mega-Drought according the drive in commute news on NPR this morning. " the driest it's been since year 800 AD" so they said. We do have water shortage issues for sure and for certain and it IS getting worse. 7 US states are duking it out for water rights from the Colorado River. The river reached the ocean last in 2014....before that....was in 1998.

Lake Mead down by Las Vegas gets a new lower bathtub ring every year. And last year they spent $817 million on "the third straw" / pipe to get water from a little lower down. https://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/the-third-straw.htm

They pay residents up to $2000 to rip out the sod and xeriscape the residential properties. Hooray for Cacti!

[mikethecactusguy]

Has anyone paid attention to the Palm Spring region and all the golf courses there. 100's and they are always green. Why? Because they get all the water from the underground table supplied by the Colorado River. You talk about water hogs. I know they have aerated soils and substrates so that the surface dries fast. But it is still takes a lot of water to maintain a golf course.
The Los Angeles DWP has been paying companies for years to tear out sod and replace it with xeriscape. It became big business here in Los Angeles for a while. Companies popping up and advertising.

[CactusJonny]

Curious if anyone has had any thoughts about using rice water for watering cacti?

I collect rain water when I can, but living in LA, I've run out already. And being pretty water conscious - I collect the water I use to clean my rice before cooking (as well as clean my filters for coffee), and use that water on my other plants, which seem to be doing okay. However, I have yet to use that water on my cacti - anyone have any experience with that?

[DaveW]

It's organic so should not do them any more harm than old lady's watering their windowsill Echinopsis with tea water and putting the tea leaves on the soil since S. American cacti usually prefer a soil just on the acid side of neutral. However you would probably need to periodically leach the soil with clean water to avoid any toxic build up of salts.

See:-

https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when ... fee-or-tea

[ilariav]

A few years ago we were using a spring for drinking water. We found a small reverse-osmosis filter at the local big box store for around $300. It was easy to attach and stripped bacteria and minerals out of the water. Unless you are watering hundreds of plants the filter rate should be fast enough for your plants.

Otherwise if it is just mud/clay slurried in the water, put your watering water in a bucket and let it stand overnight. Most should settle out. Then you can add the sludge to your compost or outdoor ornamentals.