auclairdelalune: Recycling in the garden

If I weren’t vegetarian I would say that this is a way to kill two birds with one stone (maybe it’s a way to stun two tofurkies with one stone?), but a rain barrel is a great way to both reduce and reuse all at the same time.

Water is a limited resource, particularly this time of year in Central Florida. There are lots of ways to reduce water consumption in the home, but one of the areas that deserves attention and is one of the most wasteful uses of fresh water is irrigation. Aside from choosing native plants for landscaping and reducing the need for irrigation through xeriscaping, rain barrels are very effective tool for catching and storing rainwater to use in the garden, thus reducing the need for city water.

I’m not the handiest of people in a carpentry sense, so I signed up for a class offered by my local county to get help in constructing my rain barrel. It took very little work and materials to construct the one I use. My food grade quality drum is recycled, and the other materials are easy to find at any hardware store. Easy instructions can be found on line (one to check out would be http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/Rainwater-Harvesting-Rain-Barrel-Setup.aspx).

Last year we connected the rain barrel to an extra soaker hose we had, but soon found that we didn’t have the water pressure to make this work well enough to distribute water through the garden. This weekend we upgraded the rain barrel irrigation by connecting damaged hoses (yet another way to recycle/re-use!) with holes drilled every six + inches. This proved to be a terrific project for older kids learning to use tools. We had to figure out how to use the hose repair/attachment kits to connect our damaged hoses and then we had all of those holes to drill.