But one of the best ways to keep your garden alive during a drought is to take preventive measures . Most people know that limitations will be put in place in arid months so you should take advantage of the rainy season to prepare. By setting up barrels to capture rain you can ensure an enhanced water source throughout restrictions. You may think that this is a hard task. But it can save you many gallons of water, and hardly requires any effort . Finding the barrels will probably be the hardest part. You can use your own rubbish cans, or head to your home improvement warehouse to get a few 55 gallon plastic drums . These can be costly and difficult to transport, so keep that in mind before you go to the warehouse. You will possibly want to cover the top of the barrel with a screen of some sort to filter out any unwanted leaves or debris that might fall off the roof of your dwelling.
Once you have your barrels ready, you’re faced with the decision of where to place them. Usually all through rainfall, there is one corner or segment of the dwelling that rain tends to pour off of. If you are taking the easy line of attack to barrel placement, just place the barrel under all the places where you see large amounts of drips. However, while this might be the simplest way to place them, you won’t see very high volumes of rain in the barrels .
If you want to take a more complicated methodology to placing the barrels, you should consider tweaking your gutter system a bit . If you remove each individual segment and place it at a very slight slant so that all the water is diverted to the nearest corner of the house, you can place a rain barrel at each corner. This way you use your entire dwelling and roof as a water catcher. You will catch hundred of litres or gallons of water this way.
After a heavy rainfall, each individual barrel perhaps won’t see very much rain. If it looks like it won’t be raining more any time soon, it’s a good idea to pour out each barrel into one main central barrel. Seal it and save it out of the way, for whenever you may need it . Doing this also allows yuo to effort with empty barrels, instead of 3 or 4 half full ones - believe me this can be tiring.
The use of water barrels might sound like an antiquated idea . However, when you’re in the midst of a drought and you’re able to spare that extra couple of gallons for your garden in addition the city allotment, you’ll be grateful for every bit of time and money you spent on collecting all that rain. All it takes is a few trips out in the backyard every time it starts to sprinkle, and you’ll be a very happy gardener when water isn’t so abundant.
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