Rain, rain...

Come and stay!

C and I went ahead and bought two rain barrels off Craigslist in June and definitely seeing the payoff! As luck would have it, we bought the barrels, rushed to set them up that day since it was supposed to storm, and... it didn't. We had almost 2 weeks of no rain, and finally we got massive storms the following week! Ever since then it's been on and off, but thankfully we've never completely run out of stored water. We've come close, but never run out.

Our setup is pretty simple; we have the retaining wall that was built last March, where we put in a French drain to divert the water away from the house. We purchased a little piece of flex gutter which is set up to drain right into barrel #1 under the deck. Knowing that we want to keep as much water away from the house as possible, we chose this one to be the recipient of the trash can we had been using to catch water. A little piece of hose, a hose fitting and there you have it... an overflow container!


Barrel #2 involved a bit of cutting, but it was still very easy to set up. It is positioned at the back corner of the garage, conveniently tucked behind the house. This barrel doesn't have an overflow container, but I think that is going to change very soon. We did take off one of the caps for the overflow water and let it just drain out where we already had water problems from the original gutter.


An example of them in use was one week early on that brought .75 inches of rain according to the Weather Channel. We filled up both 55-gallon barrels, 2-5 gallon pails, 1-2 gallon watering can, 1-1 gallon watering can, 2-2 gallon pails, 1-1 gallon pail, and 1-33 gallon trash can. That puts us at a grand total of 161 gallons saved from one rainfall! This means that I can water the veggie garden 5 times (when it's in its max planting) without running out. Due to the constant fear of drought, the rain barrels were crucial to our garden. Overall we never had to use the hose to water, yay!