Watering Your Bonsai With Rain Water
Tap water contains many chemicals that aren’t great for bonsai; ammonia, chlorine and chloride being amongst the worst offenders. In hard water areas, limescale causes many problems particularly with the build up of limescale on the trunk, bonsai pots as well as a white film over the leaves.
Switching to rain water, and water obtained by reverse osmosis during the drier summer months isn’t that difficult and for a relatively small amount of money and effort, it’s possible to have cleaner, more healthy water for your trees, coming through your hose.
The most important thing is to have some kind of container to store rainwater whenever it rains. The larger the container, the better, simply because it will last for longer.
However, it’s possible to have a clean water system with just a single water butt connected to your down pipe, collecting water from the roofs of your house, and any outbuildings you may have.
In my garden I have anything up to 300 trees that require water at any one time. I have installed a large 900 litre water tank behind an outbuilding in my garden, and I use this to store water that falls onto its roof.
If you shop around it’s possible to get water tanks of all shapes and sizes; I’m restricted as to how big a container I can physically carry through into the garden so I have this narrow but wide water container as storage.
Inside the water container is a hose lock ‘waterbutt pump’ easily available from Amazon and other retailers that will pump water the entire length of the garden with very good water pressure, even with a 30 metre length of hose.
It’s simply a case of plugging it into a power supply, dropping the pump into the container and switching it on. The 900 litres of water will last me around a week to 10 days even in the hottest of weathers.
So what happens if I use up all of the rainwater in the container? That’s where RO or reverse water comes in. A straight-forward RO system is plugged into the mains water supply.
Around half of the water overflows out through a tiny pipe to the side of the container. The other half is pure, clean water that fills up my water container.
The RO system cost me just £40 and has so far lasted me a year or so between filter changes. The £20 filter sets remove all chemicals from the water and leave me with ‘pure water’
I keep running it 24/7 and it gives me around 24 x 7L watering cans worth of pure water every 24 hours. Enough to give me trees a good soaking everyday.
No limescale or chemical problems for my trees at all.
I am lucky, I also have two large much cheaper 240 litre water butts that are connected near the top of the garden and these tend to fill up faster being fed by the house and two garage roofs.
These waterbutts have a waterbutt pump that can be used to water my trees, or have the water sent down to my main tank that we’ve already seen.
So is it worth the effort? Absolutely. My trees are greener, healthier and they don’t have a film of limescale built up on the leaves by late summer, and better still the trunks of my trees and the pots are also free of limescale stains.
Lime-hating trees such as Azalea and Acer palmatum bonsai are also much healthier.
The downside is that some bonsai like some calcium and a higher pH than rainwater can provide, these are now being given calcium via Chicken grit and/or liquid silicone, dosed every month.
Species that benefit from rainwater but then require additional calcium from time to time include many uk natives such as elm, hawthorn, blackthorn and spindle.
Overall, switching to rainwater/RO water is definitely an improvement to the health and vigour of your bonsai collection.
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