Rainwater Harvesting and Urban Food Forestry: the Transformation of Our Urban Home (part 1 of 3)
How We Turned Our Urban Property into a Thriving Micro Farm
We’re often asked how Verge Permaculture began. Settle in; here is our story, along with the insights we’ve gained along the way…
In the early 2000s, we partnered with my mother-in-law and transformed her property into a permaculture oasis.
After leaving our jobs in Alberta’s oil industry and travelling the world for almost four years learning about renewable energy, low energy buildings, rocket mass heaters, rainwater harvesting, organic farming, and composting, we came back to Calgary and started working on the only land we had access to: my mother-in-law’s home. She encouraged us to renovate her house and property using permaculture principles….and the seed of Verge Permaculture was planted. Within ten years, the results were hard to believe.
Ground Zero
This is the home we started with: a 1970s bungalow on a 5000-square-foot lot in east Calgary. The house was poorly insulated and had an ancient (and haunted) furnace, with front and back yards that had been sprayed with Weed and Feed for years. It was a daunting project, but we went in with a saying from Michelle’s mum:
“You will overestimate what you can do in one year and underestimate what you can do in five”. ~Annette StCyr
To this day, I use this saying with my clients and keep it top of mind when I am taking on a new project.
Eight Years In: A Demo Site in Process
This photo really captures the transformation that the front of the yard displayed over less than 10 years. Meanwhile, we continued innovating and making changes to the property.
The property in this photo has a medicinal and culinary food forest, a completely renovated and re-insulated home, culinary backyard garden with cob oven, outdoor kitchen, passive solar greenhouse, and complete rainwater harvesting system.
Order Of Operations: Rainwater Harvesting First
In permaculture, water is the master element. If you get the water element right, everything else follows along. When we started, most of the water was hitting the roof and flowing away into the stormwater system.
This is pretty typical of the way cities and subdivisions are designed: with drainage systems that remove water from the landscape almost as fast as it hits the ground. As soon as the rain is gone, we then spend vast amounts of energy pumping the water back up to our homes. In effect, we’re patterning our cities after deserts, when they should be patterned around forests.
The City of Calgary uses an estimated 30% of its energy pumping water and sewage — all because we got the initial design wrong. This needs to change, and we wanted to show some small things that households could do to start this change.
On-Site Rainwater Storage
We made rainwater harvesting our first priority…and within less than 10 years, instead of losing most of our rainwater to the stormwater system, we were capturing close to 90% of all the rainwater that hits the property. We either stored the captured rainwater in tanks, sank it into the ground, or used it to grow food.
We installed two types of rain storage tanks on our property, two of which are above-ground tanks and one which is below grade.
The above-ground tanks are IBC totes, which I don’t recommend (I will discuss this in a future article); they store 1000 litres or 200 gallons. The tote in the image below stores water for the greens bed, with all of the overflow water feeding the food forest through a swale.
The other style of tank is a custom-built below-grade rain cistern, which doubles as a patio. This tank was formerly a strip of lawn perched on top of a terrace in our backyard. We excavated it, lined it with a pond liner, installed culverts to create voidage and then finished the top off with a patio. The tank stores roughly 3000 litres or 600 gallons and meets most of the water needs of the passive solar greenhouse. The easiest way to explain how this tank was installed and works is by watching the 6-minute clip below.
We added a third tank behind our garage, to capture water from the garage roof.
One of the unique things about our rainwater harvesting design is that every water storage system we installed has an overflow system feeding into another element on the property. This is different from most conventional rainwater systems in that, where overflow water is typically just discarded, we put it to work. Let me give a few examples:
1)The front rainwater harvesting system captures rainwater from the front of the house, stores it in the tank, and the overflow feeds the food forest.
2) The below-ground rain tank is filled by the rear roof of the house, and the overflow feeds the back gardens.
3) I even traded a case of Budweiser with my neighbor to get access to his roof rainwater that was just going to waste. He took the bait and I got ~15,000 litres (4000 gallons) of water for my food forest that would have just bled out into the storm drain. :)
“Waste is just an unused resource” ~Bill Mollison
Capturing rainwater allowed us to meet all our outdoor water needs in a typical rainfall year, without having to use grid-based water. This made it possible for us to grow most of our greens and herbs.
Food Forest
The front yard is where we positioned our food forest. If you have never heard of a food forest, here is Wikipedia’s definition:
Forest gardening is a low-maintenance sustainable plant-based food production and agroforestry system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields directly useful to humans.
We filled our food forest to the gills with as many different perennial fruits, herbs, berries, and vegetables as we could fit in the tiny space we were allotted. In addition to providing us with yummy food, it provided our kids with hiding places and a unique understanding of botany and an innate knowledge of where food really comes from.
The front of the food forest is where our community “Fedge” is placed. A “Fedge” is a fruit-hedge. It consists of Nanking and Romeo Cherries and its “mission” was to taunt pedestrians to “steal” fruit from our garden. IT WORKS! These cherry bushes produce copious harvests of cherries and humans cannot help but pick a juicy red cherry when they see one, it is in our DNA. It was my attempt at subversively getting people to think about abandoning their front lawns.
In our food forest we planted plums, cherries, apples, seabuckthorn berries, currants, rhubarb, asparagus, goji berries, honey berries, Russian almond, raspberries, good king henry (perennial salad green), sorrel, angelica, clover, alfalfa, rhodiola (medicinal root) and much more. It is an incredible space to be in and beats the lawn!
For a more visual tour of the property, take a look at the first part of our 3-part mini-doc of our home transformation HERE.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this article where I talk more about our water systems and how we grow most of our greens all spring, summer, and fall in Calgary’s harsh climate.
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Rob’s Bio:
In less than 10 years, Rob Avis left Calgary’s oil fields and retooled his engineering career to help clients and students design integrated systems for shelter, energy, water, waste and food, all while supporting local economy and regenerating the land. He’s now leading the next wave of permaculture education, teaching career-changing professionals to become eco-entrepreneurs with successful regenerative businesses. Learn more and connect with Rob at https://vergepermaculture.ca/contact/
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