Chawn’s Rainwater-Fed Backyard Orchards in the Scottsdale Desert

Scottsdale, AZ • In partnership with Galaxy Gardens

Chawn made me laugh from the first moment she reached out, with the details of her phone consultation scheduling request:

“Looking for help in designing a more resilient and productive back yard. I have a small stand of fruit trees that have been moderately successful, so there is hope for me. :)”

But I started to get excited when I looked up her property on Google Earth and saw the size of rainwater catchment she & her husband were working with. Over 3,600 square feet coming off the roof into the backyard! The rainwater harvesting possibilities were massive, and exactly what her goals demanded. Resiliency. Productivity. That is what rain supports in the desert.

Throughout our interactions Chawn felt so friendly and aligned in her vision & values that I felt fully compelled to help her achieve her goals of increased fruit yields and reduced water needs.

I recommended creating mulched & rocked infiltration basins around the root zones of her fruit trees on both east and west sides of the backyard. The heavy rock around the edges keeps mulch & gravel separated, and prevents soil sinking into the basin. The wood chip mulch inside the basin improves percolation rates of rainwater into the soil surrounding it.

One of our values is simplicity, and one of the key aspects of this job was simplifying the existing seamless gutter system that had been installed. Conventional gutter installers like to add in lots of downspouts, but in this case two of them were unnecessary and unsightly.

We removed the two extra downspouts, sealed the holes, and rehung the gutters to send water the other direction — conveying all that precious, pH balanced, dissolved nitrogen-rich rainwater into a single larger downspout on each side that feeds into the new basins.

We also gently reshaped certain areas of their backyard to properly direct extra rainwater into the fruit tree root zones rather than losing the runoff.

With these strategies, we not only took advantage of the 3,600 square feet of backyard roof catchment, but also the several thousand more square feet of passive sheet flow in the surrounding landscape areas that are slightly elevated. This is how we desert-dwelling rainwater harvesters turn a 1” rain event into many, many inches of rain concentrated in specific areas!

After rerunning sections of irrigation with our trademark “swing pipe” that no other irrigation installers use—who knows why? It’s thicker, holds tighter in compression fittings, and lasts 10x longer than regular drip tubing—and larger mushroom bubblers for deeper watering, we transplanted a mature ocotillo to a better location in the yard.

We finalized the project with a huge 8’ tall by 16’ wide cattle panel trellis covering the west wall that gets blasted with hot afternoon sun during the summertime. Two yellow orchid vines (Callaeum macropterum) will quickly grow to fill in the area, creating a long-living green wall that keeps their bedroom cool all summer long!