Rain barrel #1: DONE!

My father was kind enough to donate his old water softener tank to me for conversion into a rain barrel. Since the thing held rock salt and water for the last 10 years in his basement and it still looks like new, I figure I should be able to get a few good rain barrel years out of it! It has taken me a while to finally get everything I need to convert it, but at long last I'm finally done. I just finished about 15 minutes ago, so it's too dark out to photograph, but I will take some good ones tomorrow.

Steve and I also drove to Imlay City and bought a few 58 gallon pickle barrels to convert. Since I had the baby, we could only fit 4 barrels in the van, which means that without the baby we could easily get 8 in there.

The basics of these barrels are these:

58 gallon pickle barrel (or any food grade barrel that has never held chemicals) with (2) 3/4" holes. Bore one hole near the top and one close to the bottom. We are using 1/2" brass faucets and 3/4" - 1/2" threaded hose adapters for the tap and overflow on the barrel. The final piece is the lid. Since the downspout has to run into the top of the barrel to fill it and you don't want debris or bugs to get in, you have to both cut a hole in the lid and seal that hole with screen to keep out the bad stuff. I chose to drill a gridwork of holes in the top of this particular barrel and then place a piece of screen beneath to seal out unwanted pests. The nice part about the softener tank is that the lid doesn't screw on, but it still makes a very nice tight connection. The barrels we bought have screw down lids, making it slightly difficult to open them without anything in them.

I'm very excited to get the other two completed and then I've got to alter the downspouts on my house and install some new gutter for the barrel by the garden. That is going to be the hard part. Mostly because I've only ever once hung a gutter. But that is what this blog is all about, right? Me figuring out how to do this homeowner stuff one project at a time.

New batch of Kombucha

I was having mold problems, but it would seem that I have that problem sussed out. I just got 2 more quarts finished and I would have started 4 new ones but the 2 oldest cultures were getting really grey and I'm not sure how much longer they will be effective. I put the two oldest ones together to see what would happen and I followed the standard formula for the other 2 jars I started. So far, each quart has taken about 3-4 weeks to fully ferment. I also found out that the only tea I can use to get a decent outcome is a Keemun-A loose leaf black tea. I had a couple of green tea batches go alright at first, and I tried a loose leaf oolong this time to see what would happen. But the best tasting tea I have made has been the Keemun-A. I also tried using a bagged brand which I won't name, and I ended up with mold in that one too.

So my final conclusion would seem to be this:

Only use organic loose leaf tea with no chance of additives.
Only use coffee filters to cover since nothing else lets enough air in to prevent mold.
Make sure to thoroughly wash the jars and then do a final rinse with filtered water.

So far I have only had success using these methods. Here are some new pictures of what I did.

From Food I Made

From Food I Made

Grass!!

Our yard has begun! It took about 15 days for grass to sprout but it finally happened. I think my hesitation to waste water has been a detriment to its growth, but to be honset, I would rather pay less for water and have no yard. Anyway, the parts of the yard that get more water have begun to sprout small patches of grass and so we have a start to a new yard after almost a month of no yard.

From Stuff I Fixed

We also have quite a few seedlings coming up in the garden. I didn't get all of the vegetables planted this year so I will have to be better about it next year. In my defense, I had to build the garden boxes and get the soil going before I could get started planting. I did put some tomato and pepper seedlings in that I had pre-planted indoors in April, but nothing grew well inside this spring. I think it may be due to the weird weather changes we had. I got the final boxes built and filled. I planted lettuce in these two hanging boxes to keep room in the limited space I have for bigger plants.

From Stuff I Made

I hope I get a decent yield this season despite my laziness in getting everything done!

I hate updating from my phone

For some reason my phone won't let me go widescreen on the keyboard using the blog app I have so I am forced to correct my writing all the time.

I got more new pictures of the planter and the garden beds uploaded to the Stuff I Made album. I went to the city offices with a friend yesterday and loaded up a truck full of compost. I mixed the peat in with the compost and now I have to balance the soil in each bed based on what I'm growing. I'm not really sure of what I'm doing when it comes to soil additives yet but I don't think it will be difficult.

The 4x4 posts will hold the framework for my hanging planters and then I just need to get the rain barrels in and I'm done prepping.

The yard has been seeded but we haven't gotten very much rain lately so I may have to water tonight.

- Posted using my iPhone