New and Improved Water Catching System..Yay!

You may remember our water catching system/bee watering hole from last year…

It’s just an old watering trough (ok, I think it’s a watering trough, Peer thinks it’s an old tin bath tub) that we found here on the property when we moved in. It holds about 40 gallons of water, we set it under one of the downspouts from our roof and used it to water the garden when rain was scarce.

Obviously it’s not enough for a real drought and we fully intended to upgrade it “one of these days”. Well “one of these days” finally arrived! We’ve had some seriously HOT weather so far this summer with very little rain. We spend an hour or more hauling water from our creek, with buckets, dumping it into our little trough and then using it to water the garden, nearly every evening. Way too much work! And while it is comforting to have the creek so close to the house, it is also comforting to know that we have a water catch of our own, even closer to the house.

And so, early Saturday morning, before it got too hot, we headed for the nearest hardware store and got ourselves some decent sized rain barrels…woo-hoo!

I can’t believe that we actually got these into the back of our tiny old car, but here’s the proof

Yes, that’s a Woody Woodpecker sticker on the side window…it helps the car go faster.

These barrels hold approx. 80 gallons each (300 liters each), plus the tub which means that we can catch and store approx. 200 gallons (750 liters) of rain water. This only catches the water coming down one half of our roof, we plan on getting more barrels so we can set them up in the back of the house and catch even more. This will do us nicely for now though. These cost us about $60.00 each. Folks in the US can probably do this alot cheaper since prices are lower for most things over there.

We cut a hole in the top of the first rain barrel so the downspout fits snuggly into it. We dug the ground a bit so that the second rain barrel would be lower than the first..

Then we cut a hole on the side of the first barrel down near the bottom. We added a spigot with a hose connecting the two barrels so when the first is full, it will begin draining into the second barrel, filling it as well. When the second barrel is full it will drain into the trough. Not very sophisticated but it works and is very affordable.

The hoses coming into, and out of, the second barrel…

We stuck the piece of downspout that we had to cut off, into the trough and set another length of hose into it so the second barrel can over flow into the trough.

Now all we need is some rain to fill them! Supposedly we are due for rain today but so far nothing…I’m not holding my breath :/