Well, there's a surprise. They got it wrong on the weather forecast. It was supposed to rain most of the night and stop around 9am. So off I went on my gardening job. It rained almost continually and mostly heavily until I gave up at noon and came home again.
And yet I'm quite pleased. We had a very dry April and when everything in the garden was wanting to make that big spring burst of growth, the water wasn't there to fuel it. The ground had become bone dry to at least a spades depth and it doesn't get wet again to that sort of depth without nice steady rain over an extended period. Which we've now had, so it could stop now and that would be good too.
I'm on a water meter so I have one of those recycled orange juice drums, 1500 litres I think, fed from a diverter on the downspout from the gutter. Only trouble is that it only collects water from about one sixth of the roof and I wanted to fill it before the rain gave out. So I have another diverter on another downpipe, feeding into a bucket which I go out and transfer to the main tank, in the pouring rain, at about 30 minute intervals.
I need to rejig the guttering so all the water from the back of the house fees into the tank, but there's a lean-to greenhouse in the way. It's small wonder most people don't bother to collect rainwater. It's either a complex DIY job or an expensive paid for job and you're not going to recoup the cost in a hurry. Perhaps the government should consider subsidising water harvesting in the way it does for solar panels and roof insulation.
In the meantime, for at least the last hour I could have driven a mile south and been in sunshine; but the weather is coming from the west and that way is thick cloud as far as I can see. So the rain goes on.
No comments:
Post a Comment