Rain

It occurred to us that we could irrigate our garden with rain water. The
concept of a rain barrel is an old one, and has been out of style for a long
time, what with constant running water at any city person's disposal.
However, if one wants to conserve resources, and to save money when one's
home is on a water meter, then it seems to me that it may be time to take a
second look at water barrels.

At first, we went to price some actual water barrels at a local farm supply
store. They seemed a little expensive, although they would no doubt
eventually pay for themselves. Then, while emptying garbage one day, I
noticed that two of our three plastic trash cans are rarely used. So, we
cleaned these out, put them on two sides of our front porch at the bottom of
two roof valleys, and waited for rain.

This has been a dry spring, so we only filled them about half full until
this past week when we had April-like rain. Nice, slow, long rain that
filled them to overflowing. Now that they are full we will put the plastic
lids back on them to keep out mosquitoes.

We have been saving gallon milk containers for irrigation. This way we don't
have to drill holes in our fairly new trash cans. I read in The Complete
Tightwad Gazette about using these by poking holes in the bottom with a push
pin. Then you can fill them up and set them in your garden as soak
irrigation.

The plan for the future is to build a more formal rain irrigation system.
The above was our own idea, but the following comes from an Internet site.
The plan I liked is to build a stand that raises the barrels above the level
of the ground to create gravity pressure, then put a spout near the bottom
of each barrel. We then attach the barrels at the top with PVC pipes, put in
a gutter system, which we will need to install, and have the rain spout drop
into barrel number one. After the first barrel fills, the water runs through
the PVC into number two. When that one is full, then into three, and so on.

We will attach our timer to the spout of the first barrel and attach a
soaker hose and run that to our garden. When we are ready to irrigate, we
just turn on the spout and timer and let her go! After barrel one is empty
or too low for practical purposes, we move the timer and hose to number 2,
and so forth.

The goal here, in addition to the obvious saving of the planet's resources,
is to continue to lower the cost of our gardening to as close to zero as we
can get it. The less it costs, the more each vegetable saves on our food
costs, not to mention giving our family healthier eating with organic foods.