Saturday, March 24, 2012

Rain Drops are Falling on My Head!

          Hello friends, it's raining here and down to fifty-nine degrees, now this is the spring I know! To go a long with Spring and April showers I thought I'd tell you how we made cheap rain barrels.
   Here are four ways to make a cheap rain barrel that won’t suck to look at every day.
    You can buy 55 gallon barrels for about ten dollars (or check in with your county, mine was giving them away for free, limit two). 

    1.) Then we covered the barrels with old chicken wire we already had.
    And then we planted Morning Glory’s( one of my favorite vines, fast to grow, no need to fertilize, and the less water it gets the more it blooms) around the base so that they will grow around the wire and hide that ugly blue plastic.   You could also put potted flowers or plants on top to completely hide it!

   Now we made one to catch the rain water from the roof and one is for over flow.
  Do you know that one inch of rain water running off a thousand square foot roof produces six hundred gallons of water?
2.) Paint it with the spray paint that they have out to paint your plastic lawn furniture. You could do it in Terra Cotta and then put plants on top of it. Or paint it to match your house so it just blends in.
3.) You could bury it in the ground leaving two to three inches above ground and put gravel or mulch around it.
4.) The other one I like a lot is using old wood to make it look like an old wine barrel.
   Whatever way you choose to do it, decorated or leave it plain, this is something so easy and yet so important.
    There is no reason to waist our drinking water on plants that like dirty water.
   Mother nature and the Universe will thank you!


Yes this is a rain barrel!


      I hope this makes you at least think about having a rain barrel, or gives you some idea's on how to make yours blend in with your home. If you do please send me a picture of it and with your permission I'll put it up here!
    Have a good weekend and stop by tomorrow for picture day, don't forget to drop by Bridget's Daughter for Sunday's Funny's! Until we meet again...













1 comment:

Leanna said...

We bought a couple of large heavy plastic garbage cans with the locking lids. We cut two round pieces of window screen and secured them on the top of each can with bungy hooks to keep out mosquitoes and anything that is in the rain gutters on the house that empty into both cans.

I am going to have to ask my husband to get a couple more cans because we have been having so much rain around here in Texas lately which is rare. Water is very precious to us here and these cans hold plenty of it for my house plants as well.