It's raining....

Ok, so I rarely post. Think of it as a mechanic whose car needs fixed, a plumber with a stopped up toilet, a seamstress with hems too long, a hair stylist who needs her roots covered....you get the picture. But here I sit with Ernesto bearing down on us, a chicken in the oven, okra waiting to be fried and me killing time until Jess gets home from work. Ralph is happy on the couch with all the pets camped out on top of him.

As the rain finally arrives after a most dry summer, I thought I'd share the latest of farm gadgets (pardon the lack of pictures). After five years, we finally had rain gutters installed on the barn. Not wanting to squander all that wonderful rain we had been dancing for, we plumbed the downspouts into a stock tank to capture the runoff. Our 100-gallon Rubbermaid said idle for several weeks until we were blessed with 3/10th of an inch of rain last week. Starting out dry, the tank was millimeters from overflowing when the rain stopped. So we can officially say that 3/10" rain on half our barn roof yields 100 gallons.

Recently I was awarded a Project Grass Grant to increase the fencing on my farm for rotational grazing and the big question was how I was going to provide water to my stock. So I put Ralph to work with his creative ways. For those of you who remember the stories of the fish boxes, they are having yet another iteration. He plumbed the 100-gallon tank at the barn with a ball-valve leading into a collapsable irrigation pipe (which he had to encase in PVC & drainage pipe to keep the more gregarious critters from playing with it) and down over the hill (gravity feed) into the famous fish box. If you've ever watched any of the newer Star Trek series, you'll recognize them as a staples of the cargo decks. They are 300-gallon poly-boxes that can be picked up with a fork-lift and they have flat lids that snap on so they can be stacked.

This particular fish box had functioned as our quasi-hot tub for many years out west (and for a while here) before being plumbed up for a water storage tank.

We've had about a half inch so far and the system is working well. Water falls from the sky, hits the barn roof, is gathered by the gutter and directed downspout to the 100 gallon tank. When it reaches capacity, water then flows through the irrigation pipe approximately 300 feet down hill to the fish box tank where it has a hose fitting to supply water to assorted water barrels for the goaty girls.

And when Mother Nature doesn't deliver, there is always the well.