Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The value of water from rain barrels

last year I would estimate that I used around three thousand gallons of rain water just to water my blueberry bushes, two fig trees, peach tree, pear tree and the four raspberry plants that died. This year I am looking into buying a large rain barrel to increase the amount of water available to us. The lower the amount of rain you receive the larger tank you would need to hold the water for longer periods of time between rain falls. You have to have sun and water to grow anything and there isn't much we can do about the amount of sun, but using a large rain water tank for rain water harvesting we can be prepared to save some money and resources.

We live on a well so we don't pay for the water directly like we did living in Las Vegas, but we do pay for the electricity to pump the water. The garden also puts a strain on the amount of water coming out of the well and during the extra dry summer last year we were unable to water as much as we would have liked. Simply Rain Barrels has a huge selection of rain water barrels and tanks for watering a back porch full of plants to a few acres of garden. Since we have lots of space we would probably go for an above ground tank, but using an underground tank or the square tanks that could mount to a wall or under your deck you could save space in an urban yard.

This year I am going to try to figure out how much water it takes us to water the garden while increasing both our collection and efficiency . If the summers are drier and drier this will become more and more important. We get large amounts of rain at once so if I can create a system to collect it we won't have to drain the well water in order to keep the garden going. This year we hope to add around ten more trees so we will need another 3000 gallons if we have a dry year.
Right now SimplyRainBarrels.com has some free shipping offers and discounts so we are going to try to get our system set up before the summer hits.



This brought to you by http://www.simplyrainbarrels.com

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