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.