But one of the best ways to keep your garden alive throughout a drought is to take preventive actions . Most people know that limitations will be put in place in arid months so you should take advantage of the wet season to get ready. By setting up barrels to capture rain you can ensure an enhanced water source all through limitations. You may think that this is a hard task. However most people find this very easy to do and financially rewarding as you will save money on water. Finding the barrels will possibly be the hardest part. You can use your own rubbish cans, or head to your home improvement supermarket to get a few 55 gallon plastic drums . These can be expensive and difficult to transport, so keep that in mind before you go to the depot. You will most likely want to cover the top of the barrel with a screen of some sort to filter out any unwanted leaves or debris that might fall off the roof of your house.
Once you have your barrels ready, you’re faced with the decision of where to place them. Usually during rainfall, there is one corner or section of the residence that rain tends to pour off of. If you are taking the effortless method to barrel placement, just place the barrel under all the places where you see large amounts of drips. However, while this might be the easiest way to place them, you won’t see very high volumes of rain in the barrels .
If you want to take a more complicated approach to placing the barrels, you should consider tweaking your gutter system a bit . If you remove each individual segment and place it at a very slight incline so that all the water is diverted to the nearest corner of the residence, you can place a rain barrel at each corner. So essentially your entire house acts as a catcher for the rain, instead of just a few feet worth of shingles . This is how to boost the amount of water your rain barrel will catch .
After a heavy rainfall, each individual barrel most likely won’t see very much rain. If it looks like it won’t be raining more any time soon, it’s a good idea to pour out each barrel into one main central barrel. Seal it and save it out of the way, for whenever you may need it . Doing this also allows yuo to work with empty barrels, instead of 3 or 4 half full ones - believe me this can be tiring.
The use of water barrels might sound like an antiquated idea . However, when you’re in the midst of a drought and you’re able to spare that extra couple of gallons for your garden in addition the city allotment, you’ll be grateful for every bit of time and money you spent on collecting all that rain. All it takes is a few trips out in the backyard every time it starts to sprinkle, and you’ll be a very happy gardener when water isn’t so abundant.
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