If you’re a gardener that has an abundant supply of water, think yourself lucky. There are many of us who live in drought zones where the garden and lawn watering rules are a restriction to the healthy growth of gardens and plants. Many people just give up when they find out how few gallons of water they are permitted to use, but some of us have just found ways to cope with less water. There are many ways to optimize your garden to preserve water while still keeping it lush.

Some of the methods include drip irrigation (using pipe or hose with small holes to gradually seep into the roots of the plant), the placement of plants in groups of equal watering requirements (to prevent wasting water on plants that don’t need it), and using mulch or compost to insulate the water and prevent drainage.

However one of the best ways to keep your garden alive during a drought is to take preventative measures. Sometimes a drought will be predicted in advanced. When this happens, you should take the opportunity to set up several rain barrels. Many people think this would be a time consuming. But it can save you many gallons of water, and hardly takes any work.

Finding the barrels may be the hardest part. You can use your own garbage cans, or head to your home improvement store to purchase a few 55 gallon plastic drums. These can awkward to transport, so keep that in mind before you go to the store. You will probably want to protect the top of the barrel with a screen of some sort to filter out any unwanted leaves or debris that can fall off the roof of your house.

Once you have your barrels ready, you’re faced with the decision of where to locate them. Generally during rainfall, there is one corner or segment of the house that rain tends to pour off of. If you are taking the simple approach to barrel placement, just locate the barrel under all the places where you see large amounts of drips. However, while this might be the easiest way to place them, you won’t see large volumes of rain in the barrels.

If you want to take a more complicated approach to placing the barrels, you should think about 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 put a rain barrel at each corner. So essentially your entire property acts as a catcher for the rain, instead of just a few feet worth of shingles. This is how to maximize the amount of water your rain barrel will collect.

After a heavy rainfall, each individual barrel probably 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 empty each barrel into one main central barrel. Seal it and save it out of the way, for whenever you require it. Then the next time it begins to rain, you’ll be able to quickly put all your catching barrels into place without having to lug around all the water you’ve saved so far.

The use of water barrels might seem 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 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 drizzle, and you’ll be a very happy gardener when water isn’t so abundant.

And, of course, rain water is so much better for watering orchids than tap water. So why not try your hand at growing these beautiful plants. Find out more
orchid care
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