Rain barrel

The first rain barrel is in. It's not pretty, but it serves its purpose. The storage container is a 55-gallon, food grade plastic barrel. This one had a previous life as a greek pepper container and still had a few errant peppers in it when we got it. We added a hose bib fitting about 6" from the bottom and a fitting for attaching to another barrel about 6" from the top. The center part of the threaded top of the barrel was cut out. The lid was then fastened back on with a piece of screen to keep bugs and leaves out. I placed a grill on the top to keep cats, squirrels, opossums, etc. from falling through the screen. The whole thing sits under one of the downspouts from the rain gutter, which was cut to the correct height. The barrel sits up on concrete blocks to add a little extra vertical height.

We got all the parts from the Indigo green store, here in Gainesville, and even attended a class where they supplied all the parts and we constructed the barrels as a group. The construction of these barrels is so simple, we would not have had any problem with it ourselves. But finding all the parts, especially the barrels would not have been easy at all. This store is a fantastic resource for us here in North Central Florida for any kind of green building or household products.

The barrel is about 2 feet vertical and 40 feet horizontal from the square foot garden. We had our first rain early this morning and it worked in principal, with a few minor glitches. (1) The downspout had not been riveted back together (yet) and it came apart. OK, need to finish the job. (2) There is a small leak at the hose bib. Again, easily fixed with a little caulk. (3) And the rate of gravity drainage is very slow. There is not nearly enough pressure to supply a sprinkler, so hand watering was necessary. And it took over an hour to drain the barrel, which was about half full. There are a couple of potential fixes here. First, we will put the barrel up on another set of blocks for a little extra height. And second, we need to work on a distribution method so watering can be done without physically sitting there with the hose. A slow system would not be so bad then.

This barrel is much too small to get all of our irrigation from it. But it's a start. We will add at least two more barrels at the other two downspouts from the house, but only if we can figure out a camouflage method for the one which will have to sit at the front of the house. We could also connect multiple barrels together at the same downspout. The system should work well for our small gardens for most of the summer growing season, when we have generally reliable rainfall which will refill the barrels and reduce the demand for irrigation. The barrels will probably be inadequate for the winter garden, when we can go weeks without any rain.