Anne, one of our many wonderful neighbors (and of course we have one grouch, too), recently had a county extension agent out to look at her yard and advise her about a “rain garden”, which is basically a garden that needs minimal water.  (Yes, we’re going to do a post on using the services of a county extension service — which is free, by the way).

Sherry has always tried to look at “best practices” in the garden, which is why we compost, use worms, etc.  And conserving water is, of course, on the list.  After she talked with Anne, I showed her a chart of our water bills for the past year, which showed a noticeable spike for the months of July, August and September.  Those are usually the hottest months in NC.  And for the last half dozen years, we have been in a drought.  Western NC has been in a SEVERE drought, but it’s been bad enough here.  There hasn’t been water rationing yet,  but they’ve talked about it.  It’s only been this year that we’ve come out of the drought, but even now we sort of skirt the edges of one.

So between wanting to be environmentally conscious, trying to save a little money and wanting to insure that we would actually HAVE water for the garden if there were rationing, Sherry set that big brain of hers to work.  The result?  Rainwater Harvesting.  The final impetus was an article in our local paper about a home that buried a large tank in their back yard to catch rain water.  I think the tank was many hundreds of gallons.  We didn’t want to dig up our yard.  Well… we wanted to, but it’s too late for that now.  So the next best thing was sort of a rain water “farm”.  We would buy a bunch of rain barrels (or just barrels, really, and turn them into rain barrels), hook them all together, and catch as much rain water as we could.  She just had to figure out a) where to get the barrels without breaking the bank ($140+ for a typical rain barrel was WAY too much), b) how to hook them together, c) where to put them so that they wouldn’t be unsightly, and finally d) where and how to hook them up to our gutters.  Whew!  That’s a lot of work.  And then…. she had to do it.  I told her to just let me know if there was anything she needed me to do, but I’ve learned over the years to just stand back and watch as “hurricane Sherry” takes on a task.  Besides, she’s retired.  I’m not.  Next Post:  “Sherry gets it done”, or Rainwater Harvesting Part II.

Filed under: Our Garden, Water conservation