Rain Barrel 2.0

Greetings, readers! I know it's been a while (it's summer, can you blame me?), but this post is a particularly exciting one. As you know, Mr. Growbot and I currently garden at our former residence (read the whole story here. ). When we actually lived there, we had built a rain barrel for the garden, but sold it when we moved away. Had we known that we would be back weekly spending time in our garden with our great friends Chad and Beth, we would not have sold it, but thus is life. Here is what the old barrel looked like:

It was very basic. The gutter went through a hole we sawed out in the top to get the rain water in (no filter involved), and I used a watering can to get the water from the faucet on the bottom. The only over-flow system that we had was that we left one of the bung holes open in the top, so that when it got full, it basically just flowed over the brim. It was a very slow process to fill up the watering can and was really a bit of a nuisance having to wait for so long. But no more of that... 

Introducing Rain Barrel 2.0! That's Mr. Growbot in the photo and he's the engineer behind this amazing new spectacle. Here are some of the awesome details of the new barrel:

For the new barrel, we used the existing bung hole in the top to put the gutter in, instead of sawing out a new one. In the existing hole, Mr. Growbot affixed what they call an "atrium grate" (code for leaf-keeper-outer)  in which the gutter fit perfectly. That means no little gaps for mosquitoes to crawl through.

In addition, we have an overflow pipe attached to the side so that any overflow will have somewhere to go, instead of having standing water on the top of the barrel. This was also a mosquito preventative measure. And now the best part....

It has a handy-dandy hand pump! Now instead of having to wait for water to trickle out of the faucet, this bad boy will push out a gallon of water in 4 pumps. And, once again, instead of drilling another hole in the top of the barrel, we used the other bung hole to affix the pump, thus no mosquitoes! And of course, we had to have the old standby...

But now the faucet is just for draining purposes, not for having to water the garden. It's like an accessory to our our giant watering outfit :)

Our garden simply cannot wait for the next big rain (and we're pretty excited too)!


Until next time.


-Mrs. Growbot