Simple Projects to Make Life More Pleasant

I follow a few different blogs and one specific blog I follow talks about all the DIY projects you can do around the house to save money. I have decided to adopt some of this idea and run with it. This blog is the ideal place to display my findings, since we are talking about agrarian lifestyles and becoming more self-sustaining.

I am going to call this series "Simple Projects to Make Life More Pleasant". If you see a blog with the title "Simple Project" you will know there will be some sort of very good idea to make life work a little easier in that post.

When I get a few of these projects completed, I will start posting methods and results as well as ingredients. I have some friends who are doing something similar, so I will probably collaborate with them on this endeavor as well. Now that winter is upon us and I have to stay inside to do many things, I have to occupy my time with new ideas. Keep watching!

Rain Barrel Instructions

It has come to my attention that several people want to know just how I made my rain barrels. I think I have enough in the way of pictures to thoroughly explain this with little confusion, but just in case, I will take more pictures of the process when I get some new barrels and add them later.

To begin, you find a barrel. You cannot use just any barrel if you plan on 1.) keeping your plants alive and healthy or 2.) consuming the products of your specific plants. Basically what I'm talking about is getting your hands on "food grade" barrels. These can be 55 gallon blue drums that have held vegetables, pickles, water...or they might be brand new and have never contained anything. I prefer pickle barrels, which can be obtained conveniently nearby and are definitely safe to use.

There are just a few simple steps to consider before you are all set. Once you have the barrel chosen, you have to get a few parts from your local hardware store to make everything work. Since this project is purely objective, you can decide how best to make your barrel function. I choose to go cheap and simple so this is what I buy:

1 - "Food grade" barrel (55-58 gallons)

From Permaculture

1 - Brass 1/2" hose bib (faucet to get water out the bottom)

From Permaculture

1 - Brass 3/4"x1/2" hose adapter (overflow connector)

From Permaculture

2 - Electrical conduit nuts (To hold the faucet and overflow)

From Permaculture

4 - Reducing washers

From Permaculture

1 - Tube of silicone waterproof sealer

From Permaculture

1 - Can of spray on, non-toxic shellac

From Permaculture

Once you have all of this, you bore 2 holes in the barrel. Depending on where you want your overflow to go, you can either line these holes up (one near the top of the barrel and one very close to the bottom) or you can offset the overflow to redirect the runoff water. Since I was setting my barrels up in series to collect more water, I set my overflow 90 degrees to the left of my spigot.

From Permaculture

In this picture, you can see that once the barrel is up on the stand, the faucet will drop water away from the house, but the overflow will direct water from the top of the barrel into the one next to it.

The top of the barrel is also something to consider. Some systems I've seen have a sealed assembly to get water from the downspout into the barrel.

From Permaculture

The problem that I have with a sealed system is that I have a giant oak tree that canvases most of my back yard and part of my roof. If any amount of leaf matter was to fall into the gutter and go down the spout, it would be a task to take everything apart to clear a clog. I opted to have an open top system and to set my downspout to simply dump water onto the barrel's lid like this:

From Permaculture

By boring holes all the way around, I assure even drainage and collection and then I finished the lid by stretching some fiberglass screen underneath the lid before screwing it on. The water isn't "filtered" but it does come through quite clear of debris.

Now comes the tricky part: assembly. After you bore your holes for the faucet and the overflow, you take a washer on the outside and one on the inside followed by a nut on the inside of each. I also used the silicone to seal the washers so there was no leaking around the threads of the hose adapter or the hose bib. Finally, I spray shellac on the inside of each fixture to prevent any major corrosion of the steel nuts and washers. I only recently made this discovery after using my barrels for a season and seeing the terrible rust that these nuts and washers build up. They aren't made for this kind of wet situation so there is no coating or galvanization to them. You might be able to find these supplies in a stainless or galvanized version, but I doubt they will be as inexpensive.

Here is a picture of another barrel I did next to my garden:

From Permaculture

I aligned the spigot and overflow on this one since there were already holes in the tank. I also had no major plans to set this one up in a series, so it made sense to line them up. Here is a close up of the assembled hose bib:

From Permaculture

Not too shabby if you are careful when you bore the holes.

And there you have it. Now for the price. You can buy barrels like these or fancier starting around $50 or $60 and going up to as much as $200 or more. I paid $20 for the barrel and about another $10 for the metal supplies. The tube of silicone was about $4 and the can of shellac ran me $8, but remember that you use very little of both and therefore the total cost of such an item is negligible. 

So basically, for about $30 you can have a terra cotta like barrel containing 55-58 gallons of water to use on anything you need to water.

Now I will add some info to answer frequently asked questions.

You don't get enough pressure from these to run a sprayer. These barrels, even raised up a few feet are better for filling watering cans than for spraying a flower bed. The only system I have found to work reasonably well is to attach a soaker hose to the barrel. There is enough pressure build-up to force a small amount of water out of the soaker into a garden evenly. Think of it this way: your house faucet has between 40 and 60 psi coming out. For every 2.5 feet you raise a rain barrel, you get 1 psi. Raised 10 feet, you get 4 lbs of pressure...yeah.

In a heavy rain that lasts a couple hours, you can easily fill a 55 gallon barrel. This depends on the size of roof you are draining into the barrel, but most of the time, if you connect to a long gutter, you have a lot of water collection happening.

At the pace of 1-2 psi, it can take a pretty significant amount of watering to empty 55 gallons. When you are using a barrel to water your garden, you tend to be directing the water onto the most important areas, the base of the plants. This means no over watering or wasted water from a sprinkler, so the water tends to go a bit farther than you would think.

I raise my barrels up for both convenience as well as extra pressure. You also may have to take the grade or slope of your property into account when placing your barrels. If your garden is uphill from your barrels and you want to use a hose, you may run into pressure problems since the end of the hose needs to be lower than the connection to the barrel. You can build stands for your barrels like I have, or you can simply set them up on cinder blocks. The options are limited only by your imagination. I just saw this picture online, showing a really nice setup:

From Permaculture

So there you have it. I hope this guide is helpful and I will be updating the pictures soon to provide close up step-by-step images to compliment the directions.

New projects!

I have new pictures of the garden to add to the Picasa albums, but in the meantime I'll post a new project which I will soon be undertaking!

 Since the new child has been here, I've been attempting to keep everything maintained, but I'm getting to a point now where I can actually begin new things. I finished one of my lettuce boxes yesterday. I also drove a staple directly into my hand accidentally...yup.

My next small project (now that I have a router table) is going to be a shelf that also holds my bicycle. Here is the picture:

From Home Projects

This thing looks AWESOME. I'm still not sure how I am going to mount it so that it doesn't end up tearing half my wall down, but after I decide on a good anchoring system and an efficient place to mount it, I'm going to own one of these!

The garden turned out pretty good. I have a lot of work to do at the end of the season to prepare for next year, but for now things are really working out well.

We also bought a share of a CSA this season. The first drop off was today. Mostly just greens and a couple of beets, but this summer is going to rock with all the food I plan on making. 

My garden has already yielded a handful of pea pods and about 8 radishes. There are at least a dozen cucumbers already growing and about the same amount of roma tomatoes also on the vines. This should be a pretty decent year as long as the rains keep coming in the next few weeks. 

On a final note, I got the picture albums organized now so that it is easier to find all of the different projects and postings. More to come very soon!

One book down...

I finished Introduction to Permaculture this morning. What a life changing book. There aren't many you can say that about and really mean, but this one is definitely in the top 3 books I've ever read.

My next literary venture is Bill Mollison's Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlement. I also have Permaculture: A Designer's Manual being delivered tomorrow. My next move is to finish my rain barrels to completion and then I'll move on to more advanced elements.

From Stuff I Found

I planted nearly everything in the garden yesterday. This year, the list looks something like:
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Cabbage
Cucumbers
Peapods
Green and Yellow Beans
Sweet Peppers
Roma Tomatoes
Celery
Kohlrabi
Carrots
Parsnips
Radishes
White Onions
Green Onions

Not too shabby, if it all grows. I used some older seed when starting the tray indoors, but I bought some new stuff for the root veggies and other plants I started outside. I haven't had much luck keeping my seeds from one season to the next. Perhaps I need a better place to store them.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

Just a quick update here. I finally edited the albums in Picasa. There are 3 new ones and one or two of the older ones got a facelift. Now you can view all the garden images in the Garden album, the home projects in the Home Projects album and (my personal favorite), the permaculture projects in the Permaculture album. Basically, I made it easier to find what you may be looking for at any given time. Of course this totally ruins many of the previous links I had posted to images, so disregard those older posts that have links in them.

I'm nearly finished with Bill Mollison's Introduction to Permaculture which means Permaculture One is in my near future. So far I have learned many ways to adapt our current living situation into an ideal permaculture solution. The big problem with implementing many of these ideas is the money it will take to build things like greenhouses and chicken coops. We are getting the gardens and yard together now, so it shouldn't be long before we can concentrate on other things. One step at a time, right?

Finally, I finished the new vegetable garden beds. Here is a "before" and "after" comparison.

Before--

From Garden

After--

From Garden

It is a bit difficult to really get the idea of how the original looked, due largely to the fact that I took rather inadequate pictures, but you can kind of visualize it. Now I have 4 trough-style lettuce boxes to rebuild and hang from the 4x4 posts and I'm totally finished.