Who's using rain barrels to collect water?

Hi All!

Now that we are enjoying our new rural living, we get to learn about lots of neat things. LOL There are no sewers here so where the rain runs off to, is completely up to you. Rain gardens are in the plans but for now I am using 60 gallon barrels I think. These are the same barrels the rain barrel companies use. I'm finding that they fill completely full with every decent rain. Sometimes it rains again before I can use all the water. We have 3 barrels right now and plans for a fourth when we put the gutter on the other side of the garage.

Do those hose connector things drain the water into second barrels quick enough to keep them from overflowing?

Has anyone bought one of those hand pumps that fits the top for getting the water out of the barrel? For now we use an electric pump and extention cord.

Other than the brass faucets, has anyone seen the plastic spigots for sale at a decent price? Some places only sell the accesories if you buy the barrel from them. Those barrels sell for like $90 and up depending on the color/material. I got mine for $8 each from a barn supply place.

I only have one barrel, a 55 gallon one I got free from a car wash place. they get the detergent in them. This one actually had a spigot in the lid which I removed and put it down near the base of the barrel where I drilled a hole. I attached a short piece of hose to the spigot and added one of those on/off thingies to the other end of the hose. I can fill a bucket or attach the short hose to a longer one and use it that way.
Remember to keep mosquito dunks in the water.

Not I Badseed but it is something to think about!

There have been many in our drought ridden-water rationed state of Texas talking about rain barrels in the Texas Gardening forum, some of their links as to where they've purchased their barrels and the various styles may be helpful to you:

http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/614204/

Great topic when it is so dry right now. Yes, I keep two 55 gallon plastic barrels for run-off. They do fill very quickly. I use the water primarily to water plants, I dip water out but the spigot is a good idea.

Ardesia, I used mosquito dunks for a couple years but would also find some leaf trash would accumulate and sour in the bottom of the barrel. To prevent the leaves and mosquitos, I use fiberglass screening. It works well and is cheap.

As a side benefit, when hurricane Rita came thru and we were without lights and water for 5 days, this provided sufficient water to flush and wash up. We had adequate drinking water stored.

I wish we had rain barrels -- we've certainly got the rain! It would be great to be able to use the water for summer/fall watering. Unfortunately, our house doesn't have rain gutters, so there's no way to channel the water into the barrels. (Or if there is, I haven't thought of it. Any (inexpensive) ideas out there?)

The July issue of my fav garden magazine, Gardener's World (from the UK), just published an issue devoted to the topic of how gardeners can deal with global warming and climate change and the likely impact it will have on UK gardens. For example, it discusses strategies for dealing with water rationing and hose bans/restrictions, redesigning your garden to focus on plants designed for a hotter, drier climate, making sure the laws regulating water usage are up-to-date and sensible (e.g., do they permit washing your patios and sidewalks down with the hose but restrict you from using your hose for hand watering?) and contacting the appropriate officials/politicians to lobby for change if said laws are in need of change, and so on. Naturally, rain barrels ("water butts") were heartily recommended.

I don't use rain barrels, but I do use buckets to collect water for the plants.

I think it's actually illegal to use rain barrels here. You're interfering with the water on its way to the local reservoir. The water that falls from the sky doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the city.

But the way I figure, the rain would fall on my property and soak into my land anyway. This way it just does it a couple days later and a couple dozen feet away.

Funny, I have a rain barrel and it has stayed empty this year - no rain. Go figure.

Podster, I have a rain chain from the gutter to the ground which I hang into the barrel so that alone would make a mesh cover difficult. Also, during the rare times when it does rain here, it comes down in buckets and a mesh cover would cuase more to splash off then drain through. I did use a screen cover in our previous home however, it is a good idea.

Good Morning Ardesia ~ Rain chains are delightful. We too are way dry but when it does rain, we get a gully washer. I haven't noticed excessive splashing from the screen but that's probably because of the excessive rain at that moment. The MD's did work well for mosquitos and anyone who collects standing water needs to be aware of that. We are dealing with WNV in this area as I'm sure many of you are. Also worry about heartworms even tho I use preventative for the dogs.
Terracotta ~ I don't have rain gutters. Too many trees... the leaves/pine straw would keep them plugged always. My barrels just catch runoff and fill amazingly quickly if it ever does rain.
WhiteHydrangea ~ You have my sympathy at being overregulated. With the water use and abuse in the world, I expect we will see it everywhere. Texas is struggling to provide water for the masses in the larger cities and as they can pull more votes than the state, the direction is evident.
Xeriscaping will be a necessary direction if we hope to contine gardening... pod

Posdter, you are dealing with masses; we are dealing with golf courses and I hate sharing with golf courses! :-)

I agree but you know the masses are wanting the water to waste on golf courses...etc.

:-))))))) Yep!

Yeah, I have the choice between using my water allotment to water my vegetables, or using it to water my lawn.

We have WNV here, too, and I really should get some of those mosquito rings that they put in water to keep mosquitoes away. When I was looking for a house I was thinking in terms of having a nice bird bath, but WNV pretty much got rid of that idea.

So many things that we never worried about when we were kids, like putting chemicals on our lawns to make them green, and squirting plants with the most powerful poisons we could find even when there were no bugs or damage visible.

I have 6 rainbarrels (each a 55 gallon plastic drum). I don't have any fancy spigots or anything, I just dunk my watering can in there and water around the house with that.

I've thought of getting a small submersible pump and using that, but never have gotten around to it.

White Hydrangea ~ You said "The water that falls from the sky doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the city." I have been thinking about that all day. The water belongs to the Almightly not the city or state. It is by His grace we receive it and shouldn't waste it. I sometimes wonder if the droughts are to get our attention!
Have you done any xeriscape planting or tried to use plants that are practical for your climate and water availability?
I keep a birdbath but change water in it daily. It is shallow and doesn't take much water. The birds prefer the water shallow. The mosquito larvae has never formed if changed regularily. You see who else drinks from it

Are you sure he's just drinkin?

Shoot nahhh.... She's pretendin' to be an orange Pookie flower. Tryin' to lure some birds into her mouth. It's what cats do. Although this is in a flower bed, there is a fence right behind her, holding the woods at bay. The birds rarely get caught at the birdbath. They zip up ito a tree at the least danger.

Hummmm. Somehow, I am not surprised that there is not more interest in this discussion. I am disappointed that gardeners do not lean more toward conservation.

I would have thought more people would be doing this. Prices on just about everything are sky rocketing!

We don't have sewers here and the water bill is every bit as much as it was at my other house and 2/3 of the bill there was for getting rid of the used water. LOL I've yet to figure that one out.

I still need to know if those barrel connectors work, if anyone has used the top fitting pumps and where can I buy spigots? :)

Well, I just ordered a plain 50-gallon olive barrel. Wish I'd seen the tip about a barn supply store first. I moved into this house a couple of months ago, and just had gutters installed. I've had 32-gal. trash cans under the downspout (which I made them put 3 1/2 feet higher than normal) and -- full! I'm so happy. We probably didn't get more than an inch of rain, but the trash can was overflowing. The plants seem to respond so much better to rain water than what they put through the pipes. I'm going to find a barn supply store somewhere.

Pod, love the cat. My females will go outside now (they've spent most of their lives inside since we were in a townhouse) but my boy won't. (Well, none of them is really either male or female if you know what I mean.) I guess the female is traditionally the hunter -- Angus watches but won't go out. They like rainwater better than tap, too.

I have a number of spare garbage cans that I could hook up to my RB if someone can tell us the barrel connectors work,

Badseed, At work the rate in town is 1/2 of your water bill is the sewer rate. We are in the country so not a problem. I do wish we had routed the grey water from the house for plants. We built new and could have but who'd a thought!

Brigidlily ~ Glad to hear about the gutters. It really doesn't take much rainfall to harvest a lot of water. I hope you have more than one downspout for rain barrels.

Sorry guys, I have never used pumps, spigots or connectors. No experience here... pod

Pod, because of the way the house is built, I have one spout in front and two in back. Unfortunately, they were put in while I was at work and he only shortened the front one so no rain barrels in the back yet. But he'll fix it and it will happen.

I've decided to see if we could breathe a bit of new life into this thread since the rain barrel part was not booming. LOL

Has anyone tried doing the rain garden? How big did you make it? How deep? How long does it take to dry out?

Rain garden? Explain please. That is not one I am familiar with...
BTW, my rain barrels are full again finally!

Badseed, I meant to ask, did you get some of that flooding?

Hubby drove around with the pump, emptied all my water into an empty barrel then drove around the yard and watered the island beds. Yesterday. It stormed early this morning and they are all full again. LOL I really need somewhere to store this stuff!!

Rain gardens:
What is a rain garden?

A rain garden is an attractive landscaping feature planted with perennial native plants. It is a bowl-shaped garden, designed to absorb stormwater run-off from impervious surfaces such as roofs and parking lots.

Rain gardens can be small, formal, home-owner style gardens, large complex bioretention gardens, or anywhere in between.

Copied from here: http://www.raingardens.org/Index.php

There is lots of info out there on them. I was curious to know if anyone here is actually doing it.

No flooding here. :) Thank you for asking. Any amount of water WAS a problem when we first moved here but I am busily working away at making that work for me. I've been digging ditches, laying drain tile, building up the ground where I can and lowering the natural run off spots or filling in ones that cause problems. What fun! Adding the rain barrels was a necessity here as the downspouts did end right at the foundation. Bad idea.

Interesting topic, you might start a new thread and change the title to maybe draw attention from those who have a rain garden.

I may do that later. Since both are related, I kind of hoped one would bleed into the other, sort of like the rain water. LOL

I'd never heard of a rain garden before. It wouldn't do me no good here even if I did live in a house and not an apt. I could probably count the number of times it has rained where I'm at since last fall.

Meant to say count the number of times on one hand.

This message was edited Jul 29, 2006 5:19 PM

White Hydrangea - I came across the Colorado "water ownership" laws when I was researching rain barrels. I thought the state allowed you to collect the rain from the gutters off your home's roof, just not allowed to collect it from a barn roof or other agricultural setup setup like a rain scoop.

interesting read. I have never heard of rain gardens before.

I am always fascinated by the way my plants look after a rain, even if I have JUST watered them. To me, the effect is almost magical.

Question: does rain collected in barrels have that same effect on plants, even if it sits in the barrel(s) for days?

Michele, that was a neat link. I hope you will start a thread on rain gardens sometime.

Michele, I was fascinated by your above link. :-) vossner, I use buckets to collect water, and although it's not around as long as a 55 gal rain barrel ... I have found that it still perks my plants up like rain. There was something posted in the GA forum about this very thing. I'll post the link if I can find it. It was very interesting. :-)

Here's something you might enjoy reading about rain water.
http://webserv.chatsystems.com/~doswell/goodwx.html
It was posted by soupcon on the GA forum at
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/608767/

Thought it fit here with this conversation. :-)
~Elaine~

I have two rain barrels, but one leaks and is not in service at the moment. I just dip my watering can in and fill it then water whatever needs it. I also bought one of those thingamajigs that you put on your downspout to carry water to a tree instead of the foundation.
I would like to do a lot more water harvesting. We are in the middle of a terrible drought and every drop counts. In New Mexico, there don't seem to be any laws saying we can't collect the water from our roofs or anything else. Some of you may be familiar with High Country Gardens. They have a water harvesting system that they are using to keep costs down. It was in the newspaper and no one seems to have been arrested.
My problem is that my house has a red tile roof and gutters really look bad on it. My working rain barrel is in a place where a couple of roofs drain in one spot. It fills up in the winter from snow, but this summer, it has not even been half full. Right now I can barely reach the water with my watering can. I can certainly understand why the Native Americans in this region do rain dances. I would like to learn how myself. Our annual rainfal is a meager 18 inches but lately it has been more like 13. Big difference!
This summer I began adding a drip irrigation system. The plants now receiving drip irrigation water look wonderful. The county agent said they would do better but I really didn't believe him. Guess what, the results are phenomenal and I have only had the first portion for a couple of weeks. This is the way to go when you run out of water in your rain barrel.
Of course, there is an initial cost, but one can do it oneself and save the labor. The parts are pretty reasonable. The only expensive parts are the timer and the filter.

thanks for the links. they were good read.

Being new to gardening (and I haven't even really started yet - still in the research stage), I just heard about the whole rain barrel idea, the other day. So obvious, and yet it had never occurred to me.

I definitely want to get several for my yard. Why waste all this rain we get here in the Houston area?

I did some searching, and while there are lots of very cost-effective versions out there, I'm also concerned with aesthetics. This site seems to have both kinds - very serviceable to very attractive. http://www.composters.com/main_water.html

I really like the Gardenware Oasis Rain Barrel, the Wood Grain or the Terra Cotta Rain Barrels since we're going for kind of an Italian style at our house. So, here I am, saving my pennies.......

pajarito, if you've seen some other threads, you'll know we old ladies in SE Texas take care of it by just dancing nekkid in the back yard. Seems to work!

But seriously, folks, I read somewhere that lightning has something to do with the grass getting greener -- I suppose it would have the same effect on other plants. Something about releasing ions -- putting positive ions in the air? I can't say for sure water from the rain barrel is AS good as rainwater from rain, but it's a heck of a lot better than tap water!

Yeah... and jes thank what it'd do to us nekkid ole ladies in SE Texas!

What's rain???