Barrels of Fun

One of our site challenges is a lack of on-demand water. As you might note from the earlier post, there is plenty of water, but it is either falling from the sky or stuck in the ground. Or flowing across the ground, in which case we're not usually thinking of irrigating.

For all those other times, though, we need a source from which we can fill our watering can. Eventually we hope to get a well, maybe even a wind-powered pump to go with it. For now we can make use of one of our site advantages: an equipment shed with a footprint larger than the garden (upwards of 5,000 sq ft) and the roof that covers it. This means that for every inch of rain we get the roof can collect about 3100 gallons of water. Wow! Specifically, the downspouts at each corner spit out 775 gallons of water for each inch of rain. Doesn't that sound enticing? It did to us, too. So Margo and our friend, Knoll, went to a Rainwater Harvesting workshop at the Montgomery County Soil and Water Conservation District this time last year.

They came away with two blue 55 gallon drums and some PVC accouterments. I put them up in relatively short order (made slightly longer by the fact that I lack the appropriate tool for cutting aluminum downspouts efficiently - you have no idea how a hacksaw will make them screech!) and was dazzled by how little rain it took to make them full to overflowing. In order to get the most out of each rainfall I put them on different corners, propped up on boards.

Now 110 gallons is a lot of water if you have an aquarium or a houseplant, but it doesn't go far if you have a garden, so we planned expansion. Being cheap, I didn't want to have to buy a plastic 55 gallon drum when there are certainly enough of them in existence already. Online I found a website, Rain Reserve, which sells rain barrel systems, but also has a page giving tips on how to find free or cheap barrels. So I went with that, and found a wonderful source, which I hesitate to divulge. But here's a clue: soda pop bottling plants get their concentrate in 55 gallon drums, and they can't reuse them. So we got four that smelled like Mountain Dew. A few weeks later I had a conversation with our southern neighbor, telling him about my big score. "What?" he said. "If you need 55 gallon drums come over to my place. I've got plenty." It turns out he already knew my source, because he'd gotten a large number from there for his daughters' equestrian practice.

Step two was adding my new barrels. I only managed to set two more up last year, one more on each corner. Since PVC was the going style, I decided to connect each pair with more PVC. This involved a lot of envisioning, and about two hours at Home Depot staring at all the large and small pieces, trying to figure out how I would fit them together. I settled on an upside-down U-shaped concoction to connect them, consisting of two right angles, a number of pieces of pipe, and a larger number of indescribable pieces to get a tight fit between the pipes and the barrels. At the bottom of the new barrel I simply added another valve. The whole picture was functional but clunky, and I found myself wanting something a little less obtrusive and a little more simple. And long-lasting.

So in May I set up both remaining barrels on one of the previously occupied corners. If you're having trouble visualizing it, there are now four barrels on one corner and two on the other.

This time I eschewed the PVC for brass hose adapters, plastic Y-connector valves, and garden hose (whatever that's made of). The result is a little more complicated to envision and carry out initially, but will last longer and look less industrial.
There are a couple of ways to connect four barrels, and I equate them to the little I know of connecting electrical "stuff", that is, in serial or parallel circuit. Since only one barrel is receiving the downspout's torrent, I thought it would be best to give it the maximum number of paths (making this a pseudo-parallel circuit). So I drilled one hole in the upper wall of each barrel, and screwed in a brass fitting that is threaded on one side and barbed (to receive a garden hose) on the other. I cut a piece of hose long enough to go from the barrel to the point between all four, and attached those to each brass barb. I connected the hoses from each pair of barrels with a Y hose connector, then cut a piece of hose to connect the two Y's. It's kind of hard to take a photo of the setup, 'cause it's in such a tight place, but I'll try with text:

O________-----------________ O
--------------- ->------<
O---------------------------------------O

Hmmm. Sorry, I guess I missed out on those wonderful years of drawing pictures with keyboard characters. But hopefully you get the point. The O's are barrels, the lines are hoses, and the <> thingies are Y connectors.

For the output valves I only had to worry about the new barrels, because the earlier ones already had their PVC valves. I drilled one hole towards the bottom of both new barrels, put in the brass thread/barb piece, put hoses on each one, and connected them at the front of the whole mess with a Y -valve connector. So I can turn on one barrel, the other, or both.

Someone pointed out that I could have saved resources by passing on the top connection and connecting them all at the bottom. Then I could use that as the drain valve, too. The trouble with that, as I see it, is that if one barrel gets a leak it will drain them all overnight, and if it can happen, it will eventually.

What I didn't mention before were the "hose repair" pieces, which allowed me to attach cut hose to all the threaded Y connections. Very similar to the brass barbed pieces (except that they are plastic), they have a barb on one side with a two-piece clamp to hole the hose on, and a male or female connection on the other side.

All in all this project used 6 brass fittings, two Y connectors without valves, one Y connector with valves, 8 pieces cut from a veeery long damaged garden hose, six female hose repairs, and three male hose repairs. Whew! At least I'll know what I am doing for the next few barrels!

So I have a lot of experience now (the kind that makes me cringe a little bit to consider). But there are many ways to skin a cat, I'm told, and so if anyone else has a suggestion I will probably take it into account.

(When scrutinizing the photos, most of the PVC can now be ignored. Like a certain structure in Alaska, it now leads nowhere.)

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The Grand Inundation

The news here, which isn't really news if you are in the midwest or have watched tv or heard the radio this spring, is that we have had lots of water coming down from the sky. In light of that, the good news is that we are not in a low-lying area and are not bordering the Mississippi. So while we do have a large creek that runs through the property year-round, the foresightful ones who situated this house 160 or so years ago had the good sense to leave a healthy distance, both vertically and horizontally, between any of the structures and the creek. In contrast, over at the garden the water table has been within a foot of the soil surface for the past month or more. That's despite its placement at the top of a hill, which says a lot about how long it will take the conventional farmer to get his equipment in the field at the bottom of the hill a few hundred feet away.

We like data here, and everyone likes sensational data, so here are the details: we received 10.05" of rain in April. Not impressed? Keep in mind that we recorded 20" for all of last year, from April 15 (when we put up the rain gauge) to December 31. Still not impressed? How about the fact that from January 1st through May 3rd we have received 22.45"?

It's true, we missed out on recording rainfall from Jan 1 to April 14 last year, but one of our nearby market-farming neighbors can vouch for our missing time: He keeps a rain gauge that tracks rainfall through the whole year. It's a straightforward design, a clear 1½" diameter tube stuck vertically to a white board. He puts marks on the board to indicate where the rainfall was at the end of each month, then empties it at the end of the year (leaving the marks to compare to the following year). He showed us the evidence when we went over a couple of days ago, and pointed out that by the end of April his place had received as much rain as it had by the end of November 2010. He's never seen anything like that, and he's been paying attention for decades now.

But this spring is similar to the last in that we've gotten a LOT of rain over a short period of time, leaving us to wonder if the sky might dry up for the second half of the year, like it did in 2010. We're hoping not, but we're also doubling our rainwater catchment just in case.

The last time I got in the soil to dig was over a month ago, so we are in a tricky place for our planting schedule. The alfalfa, parsley, parsnips, onions and leeks would like to go in now, and we're staring at the corn planting date and wishing it a little further off. But the soil will probably be an absolute bog for at least a week after it stops raining, and the end is not in the ten-day forecast.

This causes us to question our assumed timing. For instance, should we double-dig before our main-season crops go in (between March and June), or should we perhaps dig before the winter cover crops go in (September to November)? Of course, if this year goes as last year, digging would be as difficult in the dry, dry fall as it would be in the wet, wet spring.

Oh, yeah - the other good news is that it was a fabulous year for digging dandelions and finding morel mushrooms.

I'll take one last moment to describe the photos here. At top right is a trench I started for a new bed, interrupted by weather. It's important to note that the trench didn't simply catch rainwater. If you dig a hole anywhere around the garden these days it will fill up with water whether it is raining or not. Next photo down, on the left, is a lakeside dandelion patch, which in dryer times is actually a path. Third, the 2010 parsnips that we replanted for 2011 seed. On close inspection you can make out water running from the further side of the bed to the closer. The fourth photo is of the biggest morel I have ever seen, found by friends while pulling honeysuckle in our yard.

And, last but not least, Alten has been preparing to deal with any water issues in the house. Routine inspection, he assures us...

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Ice Storm!

When talk began Sunday about the possibility of an ice storm coming through this week, Margo and I got pretty excited. The odd mixture of below-freezing surface temperatures and slightly above-freezing precipitation, which coats everything exposed in an icy glaze, never seemed to happen in Willits while we were there. While they cause multitudes of wrecks, power outages, interruptions in commerce and the like, both Margo and I have always enjoyed them, and despite their destructive potential, no one who has taken a walk through the fields or woods after (or during) an ice storm can argue that they aren't beautiful events.

It started Monday night, and as I was heading home from Aikido on I-70 the windshield actually froze entirely over. That got me into the slow lane. Tuesday morning brought school closings and gratitude that none of us had anywhere to go for the day. On the half-mile walk to the garden to check our temperatures I found that the branches of honeysuckle, one of our many invasive shrubs, can be broken right off at the swing of a stick!

They were predicting up to a half-inch of ice accumulation, which seems incredible when you realize that every available surface will get coated, including roads, doors, steps, weeds, grass, littered trash, mops left out to dry, fences, power lines, and the dead limbs that have been waiting over those power lines for just such an occurrence... Which might explain the amazing green glow we each saw out different windows when the electricity was trying to decide whether to stay on or go back out last night. We only lost power for about an hour, which was long enough to be grateful for lots of candles, our new woodstove, and the foresight to have put a bunch of water aside for drinking water and toilet flushing.

As I walked around yesterday afternoon to take photos there was nearly a quarter-inch already.Today it has gotten worse from the additional fall of rain overnight, and now many businesses have decided that the school districts knew what they were talking about.

Here are some of the pictures I took... At top are weeds completely coated in ice, including their seedheads (which has something to do with how popular our bird feeders are right now). Next, one such bird feeder with a nuthatch on it. It has been entertaining watching the bigger birds, like grackles, sliding off the sides. Third, the chicken-wire roof of our hen-house run, sagging appreciably. Below are our clothesline, out of commission, and branches of a sugar maple with next season's buds encased.The weather forecast shows temperatures staying below freezing till at least Saturday, so I guess this will all stick around for a while...

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