California or Maryland? You'd be surprised.
Water is expensive. It’s just a fact of life I’m afraid. I remember well my father rationing our shower time and exercising a general tightening of the lips when the pool had to be topped up after thoughtless children splashed and cavorted in the summer sun. I believe that one good belly flop equaled four gallons of wasted water, and a casual splash squandered two. Granted I grew up in a dry State, a State that has forty-two words to describe differing levels of drought. Water conservation is just a way of life out there, a way of life that seems far away to many of us east of the Rockies.
Until summers such as this come knocking on our green and verdant doors.
It has only taken ten years of summer thunderstorms to convert me to the dark side. Now I expect rain like a teenager expects privileges. I plant summer annuals that revel in afternoon showers and perennials that list “moist” and “retentive” as the qualities that they most look for in a good date.
What’s more, I find myself expecting that I won’t have to water – indeed, that it is a weakness to water anything more than my hanging baskets and the odd bit of container finery. Add to this a genetic predisposition toward water frugality and I set my plants up for a rough time of it when a dry summer rears its ugly head. When that happens, I watch my plants bend with the heat and wilt with the sun and yell at them to send their roots deeper into the soil, like some sort of horticultural staff sergeant. I rarely take out the sprinkler, and when I do, the mites have probably moved in to add insult to injury and my plants are reading pamphlets on the afterlife.
Ironically, their California cousins are probably faring quite well at that point, for their owners have had the foresight to put in drip irrigation lines in anticipation of what will always be a crispy summer.
Penny-pinching people like me are some of the best candidates for installing rain barrels, though frugality is not a prerequisite for success. Many people are starting to harness this free harvest from the sky, and doing so can make a big difference on their water bills and to their plants.
Convenient and Free
Inspired by a friend’s setup several years ago, I installed one water barrel in the front and one in the back. The barrel in the front had spent its first career as a container for whiskey, and was now forced to endure a tee-total retirement. I cut an overflow vent in the side and made it the middleman between downspout and drain. Today, this barrel allows me the freedom to dip and pour with a nearby watering can, and adds a lovely accent to the garden at the same time.
The second barrel is the ugly stepsister of the two, hidden away under the deck far from aesthetically sensitive eyes. Although unsightly, it is nevertheless extremely well-designed, with overflow hoses, water spigot and built in top-screen; and due to the terraced nature of my back garden, a hose hooked up at the bottom of this barrel provides a gravity fed stream of soft rain water to the vegetable beds below.
Rationing is still part of my lexicon. This year for the first time, I ran both barrels temporarily dry, but friends who have three barrels daisy-chained together fared better. Mosquito dunks are also a necessary purchase, as my experiment with putting three goldfish in a newish whiskey barrel ended with drunken fish that didn’t know a mosquito larva from a maple leaf.
You’d be surprised at how quickly they fill up, even after a rapid storm that hardly wets the asparagus bed – and my favorite pastime after a real hum-dinger of a downpour is checking to see how much free water has been collected without any effort on my part.
If you have the space, make a rain barrel part of your garden plan. It’s easy, efficient, environmentally friendly and all those other adjectives that make the modern world sigh with collective delight.
Now if I could just teach the perennials how to use the watering can I’d be sitting pretty.
