Finally emptied the rain barrel…

…on Nov 8th with it being 30°F outside!  Going down to 18°F  tonight.

[Edit on 13 May, 2020: I had made this note last year and stuck it in the draft folder, then totally forgot about it.  I do not remember why I waited so long to do this.  Xmas rush at the Post Office had already long been running by then–it pretty much starts near Halloween now–so maybe I was waiting for my partner to help me get it emptied and stored in the cellar for overwinter.

I do remember I had to take breaks while filling our collection of storage jugs because even with gloves on, my hands were freezing–my chronic low blood pressure doesn’t help.  The image above is the jugs we use to store what we can when we empty the barrel (now barrels) each year.  The big one to the left was a curbside item among a squee inducing find of a big box of old glass jars with lids, some of them quite unique.  The rest (you can see the H₂0 marking on some of them) are vinegar jugs.  I store them under the sink in the cellar, keeping one upstairs for houseplant watering as well as (last year at least) to water indoor started seedlings.

I use vinegar for cleaning, so even with just the two of us we gather a few more of those each year.  I started marking them with the H₂0 when I once grabbed the wrong one in a rush when I was filling the watering “can” I use for houseplants.  (As seen to the right here–it’s an extra gravy separator we ended up with somehow, but it works great for watering houseplants.)

This year because we waited much longer to start seedlings, we still have a lot of jugs still filled.  This might help if the barrels do actually run out at any point like happened last year.

I don’t think I will ever forget how miserably cold I was that day, which hopefully means I will never wait that long again to empty them!]