Rain Barrels

It’s truly been a terrible spring—nothing but rain. That said, we decided we might as well put in some rain barrels. The city had a great deal on some basic green ones so we put in an order for one and will likely install it along the side of the house behind the hedge of spirea.

We wanted something a little more decorative for the downspout in the front of the house and we found one made by Algreen that looked surprisingly nice and even had a place on the top to plant flowers.

The first step was to install the spigot and the hose connector. Our plan was to attach drip hoses to both rain barrels to make watering the front beds a little easier.

The one piece of advice everyone with a rain barrel will tell you is to get it up off the ground so that the water will flow out a little easier and you don’t have to stoop quite so much. We were lucky to have a piece of old brick sidewalk in our garage.

The main work was installing the diverter. Some kits simply have a shorter downspout running directly into the rain barrel but that means the all the overflow simply spills out around the barrel. Instead, Jonathan inserted a small diverter into the downspout so the overflow runs down the spout and out into the yard.

The second step was to install a longer drain pipe so my lavender wouldn’t drown. (The two bags of sand we dug into the ground will help a little with drainage but not that much.) This was probably something we should have done before landscaping but we managed to find a route out of the herb bed and onto the grass.

Overall, it worked out well and it doesn’t distract from the landscaping as much as we feared. It’ll look even better once the herbs grow around it and I find some flowers for the top.