Wasn’t I just complaining about how much rain we’ve been getting?
Yeah, that’s what I thought…
Well, the truth is that we were getting a lot of rain – which if one is prone to doing some gardening – can be a good thing.
About 5 years ago we purchased three 50-gallon rain barrels. An environmental and financial good idea. Water with the rainfall, save some cash and divert some of the water from the over-worked storm sewers. And for 5 years it’s been a very win-win situation.
One of the lessons we have learned is that during a typical summer rain storm, the amount of roof run-off into the gutters then into the rain barrels is amazing. 50 gallons fills in virtually no time at all. After about a 2 hour steady rain – 150 gallons of rain water is at our service.
Only on very rare occasions have we had to resort to dragging out the dreaded hose to water our flowers and vegetables. When droughts happen, 150 gallons of rain water seems to get used almost as quickly as the barrels got filled up.
With all of the vegetable garden expansion we’ve done over the past two summers, along with sacrificing more and more lawn for additional bed space and berry bush plantings – we have a lot more green stuff to water, so the need for additional rain water collection became especially apparent. We have been tearing through and draining the rain barrels faster than ever before. Fortunately we did have a pretty wet Spring, but more rain barrels were needed – there was no doubt about that.
So we purchased and combined 3 more barrels into our system – doubling our capacity.
two behind our garage and
two more beside our deck.
We have a third set on the driveway side of the house as well – but I think you get the picture 🙂
Our now 300 gallon rain water capacity should serve us well as we move into the heat of summer 2011.
Should.
All we need now is some actual rain to fill them…
Rust Belt Rebel 
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