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Using Rain Barrels To Survive Dry Spells: Essential Gardening Info
By Frank | April 15, 2008
If you’re a gardener that has a plentiful supply of water, think yourself lucky. There are many of us who live in drought zones where the garden and lawn watering rules are an impediment to the healthy growth of gardens and plants. Many gardeners just give up when they find out how few gallons of water they are permitted to use, but some of us have just found ways to cope with less water. There are many ways to optimize your garden to conserve water while still keeping it lush.
Some of the ways include drip irrigation (using hose or pipe with small holes to gradually seep into the roots of the plant), the placement of plants in groups of equal watering needs (to prevent wasting water on plants that don’t need it), and using mulch or compost to insulate the water and prevent drainage.
But one of the best ways to keep your garden alive during a drought is to take preventative measures. Sometimes a drought will be predicted in advanced. When this happens, you should take the opportunity to set up several rain barrels. Many gardeners think this would be a time consuming. But it can save you many gallons of water, and hardly requires any work.
Finding the barrels could be the hardest part. You can use your own garbage cans, or head to your home improvement store to get a few 55 gallon plastic drums. These can awkward to transport, so keep that in mind before you go to the store. You will probably want to protect the top of the barrel with a screen of some sort to filter out any unwanted leaves or debris that can fall off the roof of your house.
Once you have your barrels ready, you’re faced with the dilemma of where to place them. Generally during rainfall, there is one corner or segment of the house that rain tends to pour off of. If you are taking the simple approach to barrel placement, just place the barrel under all the places where you see large amounts of drips. However, while this might be the easiest way to place them, you won’t see very high volumes of rain in the barrels.
If you want to take a more complicated approach to placing the barrels, you should consider tweaking your gutter system a bit. If you remove each individual segment and place it at a very slight slant so that all the water is diverted to the nearest corner of the house, you can place a rain barrel at each corner. So essentially your entire property acts as a catcher for the rain, instead of just a few feet worth of shingles. This is how to maximize the amount of water your rain barrel will catch.
After a heavy rainfall, each individual barrel probably won’t see very much rain. If it looks like it won’t be raining more any time soon, it’s a good idea to empty each barrel into one main central barrel. Seal it and save it out of the way, for whenever you need it. Then the next time it begins to rain, you’ll be able to quickly put all your catching barrels into place without having to lug around all the water you’ve saved so far.
The use of water barrels might seem like an antiquated idea. However, when you’re in the midst of a drought and you’re able to spare that extra couple of gallons for your garden you’ll be thankful for every bit of time and money you spent on gathering all that rain. All it takes is a few trips out in the backyard every time it starts to drizzle, and you’ll be a very happy gardener when water isn’t so abundant.
Topics: Flora & Fauna |
