Garden Journal: 28 Jan 2008: New rain barrel

New rain barrel

Yesterday and over night we got maybe a half inch of rain, the first significant rain we've had in quite a long time.

As reported earlier, I had gotten a new rain barrel over the weekend but hadn't set it up. But hearing on the radio that it might rain and that it would get colder as the day went on, I jumped out of bed and set up the new barrel (the white one). The green one is our primary barrel and was still full from the last rain (we haven't needed to water anything in a while).

I filled the white barrel from the green barrel and then put it in a better position (it had been partly hanging off the edge of the porch) and positioned the grey barrel where it could more directly take the rain chain, which channels the water from the gutter for this roof.

From that less than 1/2 inch of rain we gathered about 25 or 30 gallons, which isn't too bad for a very small roof (the roof involved is about 8' by 16').

This will certainly be enough rain water to supply what we need for planting our first crop of spinach and lettuce, setting out the potatoes, and getting seeds started in the cold frame.

You can't see it in the picture, but the white barrel has an outflow pipe at the bottom with a standard hose fitting. At some point I'll gang the barrels together so that water flows from one to the other and we don't have to worry about moving the chain around to fill one barrel or the other.