Let it rain
We’ve had some sunny, dry weather in the past few weeks and I’ve had to water our garden a few times, even though I’ve tried to train the plants to deal with dry spells (sorry, stunted tomatoes!) Over the rainy weekend, I found myself a bit obsessed with collecting water. My partner and I installed a rain barrel in our back yard last week, but we hadn’t had much rain to see how well it performs. Well, we got our wish — on Saturday it rained so hard that we could have filled several rain barrels. The overflow valve on the barrel shown here was spewing water for most of the afternoon, even after I filled up juice containers and other vessels I found by mining through our recycling bin.
The rain barrel sits on a wood bench that’s mounted into the edge of our deck, perfect for use with a watering can. We reworked the eavestrough a bit and added a new piece of downspout so it would sit on top of the rain barrel and direct water through the barrel’s screened top. Next time the barrel is empty I’ll have to put some spacers under it so the bench doesn’t rot!
We bought this 190 L barrel from Canadian Tire. I like this one because it has a flat back, so it can sit against a wall. I plan to put another one of these barrels in my front garden, positioned against the house. I bought a gravity-feed watering kit from Lee Valley to connect to that front-garden rain barrel so that when the soil dries out, I can just open the spigot and let gravity do the watering.
How do you water your garden?
