Why You Need a Rain Barrel

Why You Need a Rain Barrel is a great article with great reasons people purchase rain barrels. #s 1, 2, and 5 all apply to us, how about you?

The Pretty Ones

We started to make plans. With our 7 barrels we only had 3 downspouts that were not collecting water. Two were oddly placed by the previous owner on the sides of the front porch. The gutters were only 3 feet long, but still, it was water we were missing out on. Also, we had constantly hit a wall when trying to decorate the front of the house, and I had started seeing decorative barrels that looked like terracotta pots....
So the search started ;) We finally settled on two the color of terracotta that had planting space in the top and ordered them from Amazon.

We installed one on each side of the porch (Sept 2011) and set up a soaker hose from one to provide constant water to the flowers around our sidewalk. The flowers now bloom for much more of the season, and are beginning to spread out! We're hoping they grow together and fill the space in :)

2011 The Hoarding starts.....

In June of 2011 Knoxville's Water Quality Forum (http://waterqualityforum.org/) had a sale of off white rain barrels that very closely match the siding on our house. So we purchased two and set them up under the car port. These are 50gal each and with the addition of a 50 foot vacuum hose (made for swimming pools) now directs the water from the front half of our roof into the barrels for use and the excess behind the house, instead of allowing it to flood our garage :)

Two new rain barrels in car port

This allowed us to move the Moby that was under the car port into the veggie garden, finishing off the space and providing us the water we desperately needed in the garden in the heat of July.

Moby moved to Veggie Garden

This put our total number of barrels up to 7, but as you can probably guess, this just wasn't enough.
Our new found interest in collecting water had shown us how much difference we could make with just a barrel to hold water. We no longer needed water from the tap outside for our homegrown food. We had a kiddie pool for the dogs that was always full, thanks to the overflow hose on the barrel next to the strawberries. And we were able to water our garden and berry beds with less than five minutes of labor, every other day max. We cut our water bill by at least 15% and the garage wasn't flooding with every rain anymore.

Rain Barrels I reccomend

My first 5 barrels were all purchased from Keep Blount Beautiful at their annual rain barrel sales. They are Moby rain barrels, made of recycled plastic, and hold 65 gallons. These were the first and are still my favorite barrels. I've never had any problems with the quality, all the parts come with the barrel, and everything is easy to install. They are the largest barrels I have, and the easiest to use and maintain. 

KBB holds their annual rain barrel sale with their Blount County CleanUp, usually around the middle of April. They sell barrels from Rain Water Solutions, and have recently upgraded to the new Ivy barrel. But you can always count on them for a great deal and they're local.  

Here's a like to KBB:  http://www.keepblountbeautiful.org/ 

And the Moby:  http://www.rainwatersolutions.com/products/rain-barrels 

2011 the garden and new barrels

Spring of 2011 we changed the garden and upgraded from buckets to a raised garden box that the hubby and I built. It's 12'X5' and provided so much more room for plants! One barrel was not enough water for the buckets, so this year we tried our first daisy-chain and bought another barrel from KBB to hook to the barrel in the garden. This corner of the roof gets quite a bit of rain, so we arranged the space for three barrels but started with two just for experimenting. 

This is when the irrigation hoses really started to take off :)
With the size of the box the idea of holding a hose to water all those plants was not appealing. So I bought another soaker hose and got to cutting! I learned last year that the hoses in the berry beds didn't get a lot of pressure, so we put all of these on cinder blocks to raise the center of gravity, and make the top faucet level with the top of the box. I cut soaker hoses for each level of the box and pieces of garden hose to reach from the barrel to the soaker hose. This keeps the water for dripping outside of the box and being wasted. One hose split and I attached all three hoses to one barrel. A short 4 foot extension hose and they could use the water from the first barrel when the second one runs out. With this system I could water all of the veggies without more effort than twisting two faucets on and off.
The garden changed a lot that year. We put in recycled rubber pavers in place of the mulch, and moved the Moby barrel from the carport to the garden, discovering we needed the extra water in the heat of July and August.

2010 additions

In 2010  we added the barrel at the end of the strawberries

And one in the front under the car port to redirect water away from the drain for  the garage. 

The goal for these was to keep the strawberries watered without carrying a hose around the house every time, and keep some of the water out of the drain in front of the garage to help prevent it from flooding.
The strawberry bed was furthered by some hoses I picked up from a person on freecycle. I got a worn garden hose and a 50 foot soaker hose for free. I cut the soaker hose into pieces to fit the strawberry and raspberry beds, then attached them to short pieces of the garden hose to keep the water dripping only where I wanted it. Home Depot sells dozen of hose attachments and parts for only a dollar or two each. Decide how you want the hose to work and pick the attachments needed. This allowed me to water both beds by only turning on the barrels for 20 mins or so.
The barrel in the car port needed an extension on the overflow hose, so another trip to HD and the overflow ran the length of the wall and onto the back lawn. This kept the barrel from flooding the drain with excessive rain and redirected the rain that was originally coming from the gutter out the back.
This put us up to 4 barrels and held me over until the next year's sale ;)

2009 the first 2 barrels

First rain barrel, in the garden 2009

2nd barrel in the corner of the yard 2009

These were the first two barrels I bought, and they were only the beginning.....

My first confession

I started with two. I was volunteering with a local Keep America Beautiful chapter and they had a few left over from their annual sale. We were talking about starting a garden, and I wanted a barrel to use to water them, no chemically treated water for my food! I purchased two and brought them home, so excited to set them up and show the hubby all the wonders of collecting rain water that I had read about online. It's always been important to us to be conscience of our effect on our environment, and I saw this as an opportunity to lower our footprint, and learn something new. So I read the directions, leveled out an area, and set up cinderblocks to set it on. Right in the corner of the garden would work out great, it was close enough to water all the plants with minimal back and forth, so in it went. The second one was placed in the corner of the yard where it wouldn't be in the way of the mower and could provide some additional water if needed. That was spring of 2009. 

Then the ideas started. Wouldn't it be great to have fresh berries? I could put a berry bed next to the second rain barrel, and easily water it. But wouldn't it look lopsided? I needed one for the other end, but KBB was out and only sells then annually. So April of 2010 I planted the berries along the wall and made space under the other gutter for a barrel. We'd had some issues with the garage flooding and we decided to put one out there as well, since there was only one gutter draining into the storm drain in the concrete. Maybe a barrel would help control the water enough to keep it out of the garage? So I bought two again that year, and installed them as planned. 

Now it's August of 2012 and I have 10 rain barrels installed and one waiting for a new gutter to be installed on the new shop. People joke and call me a hoarder. But I look at it as a plan for anything and everything I want to do with my yard. Every barrel we have came with a planned area in our landscape. And each barrel I added saved me time or effort in my garden and/or landscape maintenance. The first visit to our house for someone always brings questions about the barrels, and even the die hard fans of sprinkler systems have to admit our system of free water and gravity fed irrigation is "cool."

So here it is, our story. I'm proud of my rain barrel habit, and I think now is a good time for me to share :)