Rainwater collection...finally
It's been a long time between blog posts, but then again during the winter there's not a lot happening in the garden.
Spring, however is just around the corner so once more its all hands to the pumps as we add a rainwater catchment system and also start to prepare the garden beds ready to be seeded in the springtime.
We bought a 1000 litre plastic cube some months ago and built a platform out of concrete pavers to lift it off the ground so we could get a gravitational flow from the saved water out to the garden beds either by hose or from filling up watering cans.....depending on where the water was needed.
I've been going to put new guttering and down pipes along the front of our garden shed/garage for simply ages but I am one of the worst procrastinators...if not THE worst in the world.
Anyway, finally I took myself off to Bunnings to pick up some lengths of guttering, brackets, nails and various bits and pieces of piping. For info...Bunnings worked out slightly cheaper than Mitre 10 Mega store.
While I set about putting up the new guttering, Lizzie was hard at work weeding and digging over the garden beds, breaking off her task now and then to hold steady or pass me something up the ladders. That's team work folks.
Step by step.
First thing was to strip down the old guttering and repaint the fascia board.
Next step was to make sure I had a slight downward gradient for my brackets so that the rainwater would all head along the gutter the right way and into the down-pipe.
Using a string and a spirit level I soon sorted this out and started to nail up the brackets.
Once all the brackets were up I started to thread the 3 metre lengths of guttering onto the brackets.
Once all the pieces were up I then glued the ends in place to stop the water pouring out and added the joining brackets between each 3 metre length et voila.
The end bracket and down pipe were added to allow the flow of water from the gutter and around the back of the shed to where the cube was located.
Then once everything was lined up, the last piece of pipe was added to get the water into the storage cube.
I didn't want any leaves or other debris getting into the water supply so cut out the centre of the black cap seen above and added a piece of mesh netting and replaced the cap....holding the mesh securely in place...below.
And over night we had some rain. Thank goodness it works!
So now I need to do something similar to the down-pipes from the house. At the moment all I have are 2 x 220 litre drums for storage of rainwater off the house roof. I think I may need to get another thousand litre cube or two instead. It's such a pity for all that rainwater, which could be stored for watering the gardens during dry times, goes straight down the drain.
Watch this space.
The next blog post will probably be about preparing for spring plantings.
