Posted in Oh noes!

When the rain barrel ran out of water…

…we realized we’d never turned the outdoor spigot cutoff on because we hadn’t needed it.  That was yesterday, the 15th of August.  Because of how the rain barrel’s spigot isn’t at the dead bottom of the barrel, we did try tipping it to get at more inside, but there’s only so far you can push that to get at the last bits left–plus then there’s the sediment issue from what ever’s gathered over the season thus far.

This was a change over last year, as we did not run out then.  The garden (particularly the kitchen garden) has grown quite a bit this year though.  We’ve trebled or quadrupled the amount of beds.  That sounds amazing until you realize how small most of our beds are.  We aren’t doing square foot beds, but some are close.  (Ok, maybe the hastily assembled compost surprise squash bed is closest to a square foot, but the rest are at least 2×2 or more.)

We really need to add guttering on the back of the house to help the second one fill easier.  That will also help with the drainage issues in that corner if yet again we don’t finish the regrade work there.

[Later note: Fortunately we had rain soon after (I forgot to note the date), which promptly filled them up enough so that we did not have this issue again during the remainder of the season.]

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