With all the rain we’ve been having recently, I’m really glad that I put in rain barrels back in April of last year. They tided us through the long, long, dry season we had this winter, and now they’re overflowing almost daily.
Here they are in a brief rainshower Saturday night (almost an inch of rain fell in under an hour):
Here’s what the first one looked like when it went in over a year ago:
You can just barely make it out hiding behind our newly-pruned vegetation out front
Within a week, that twiggy Jatropha had already leafed out, and now it’s really putting on a show. I need to put on my bonsai hat and try to trim it back in line with reality… Then you’ll be able to see the second rain barrel.
I got my first rain barrel at a workshop held at Mounts Botanical Garden by Keith Patterson of Florida Yards & Neighborhoods, a program of IFAS. It was part of a big expo put on by the South Florida Water Management District, with booths demonstrating all kinds of different ways to save water, from low-flow toilets to drip irrigation. I had really been looking forward to building a rain barrel (in fact, I’d asked Keith and everyone I knew at Palm Beach County Extension when they’d be doing a rainbarrel workshop), so I was eager to attend.
So I show up, watch the presentation, and then at the end of the show, they hand me a completed rain barrel and send me on my way! No time with glue, drills, nothing! Oh, well. I suppose, given the percentage of the population in south Florida that is past retirement age, it wouldn’t have made sense to have it be a truly hands-on workshop.
If you look closely at the first photo, you can see that I’ve had to modify the downspout from the gutters, adding a second flexible element to accommodate a higher platform. The higher platform was a result of my visit to the larger expo at Mounts; I entered a drawing and won, of all things, a second rain barrel! So I had to modify my existing setup to make room for it.
It’s a really good idea to have more than one barrel; after all, it only takes about a half-inch of rain to fill a barrel. Having another one in line with the first just doubles my water catchment at no additional expenditure of energy. And water is precious here in the land of 60 inches of rain per year but precious little storage.