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.