Summer Rain

This summer, our garden is lush.
Double-click for a full-screen view.

It rained yesterday afternoon.  It was a glorious thunderstorm that dropped better than a half an inch of rain on our garden.  As this is written, the skies are overcast and there is a promise of even more rain this evening.

Our four rain barrels are
full, and are augmented
by twenty-plus re-purposed
cat litter jugs, each
holding three gallons.

Last year at this time, we had four empty rain barrels across the back of our home.  Those rain barrels were at the receiving end of an elaborate system of gutters, diverters, and underground drain pipes to collect and carry away rain water.  It was a beautiful system; intelligently conceived and built with back-breaking labor.  But without rain, it was also pointless.  We went weeks without a drop of rain in the summer of 2016.

So, instead, with a new garden filled with plants with limited root systems, we scrounged water from every possible source.  We doled out that water with a figurative eyedropper, conserving every pint.  We watered at six in the morning to ensure no water was lost to evaporation.  The garden made it through that long, hot summer but we were exhausted by the effort.

This year, our four rain barrels are completely filled with 220 gallons of neutral pH and chlorine-free water, and an additional reservoir is stored in twenty re-purposed, three-gallon cat litter jugs.  We lavish water on container gardens to keep them blooming and on new perennials to encourage root growth.  What isn’t collected flows directly into the wetlands behind us via six subterranean conduits.  As a result, the vernal pools that were dry in April last year are still filled with water at the end of June.  It is a sign that we are, at long last, beginning to replenish our watersheds.

Diverters allow us to
switch from filling barrels
to directing water into
the wetlands behind us.

A return to more normal rainfall has an unexpected benefit as well as a drawback.  The benefit, as reported by the University of Massachusetts Extension Service, is that all this moisture has activated the maimaiga fungus.  Why is that important?  The fungus is deadly to gypsy moth caterpillars.  Caterpillars die before they can lay the eggs that would otherwise wreak havoc next spring on our oaks.  It means the devastation of the past two years will likely abate.  The downside to the precipitation is that the woolly adelgids are hatching.  They primarily attack hemlocks and the drought kept eggs from hatching.

June 2017 yielded more than five inches of rain in Boston; more than an inch above the long-term average.  We’ve had 26 inches of precipitation so far this year – four inches above normal.  This week’s Drought Monitor map shows no area in New England as being even abnormally dry.  Last year, all of New England except extreme northern Maine was in at least a ‘Stage 0’ drought and much of the region was in a moderate drought (which would become ‘extreme’ by summer’s end).

Our elaborate system of
drains is also designed to
look attractive.

We learned to cope last year.  An absolute lawn watering ban in our town (Medfield) reduced summer water usage to winter levels.  Lawns went brown.  Then, to the surprise of many homeowners, cooler weather in September and October, coupled with a little rain, caused those same lawns to green up.

The question is whether we learned any lasting lessons from the summers of 2015 and 2016.  I fear the answer is that we did not.  Driving around town this week I saw automatic lawn sprinkler systems pouring water onto bright green lawns in mid-day.  I saw other sprinkler systems operating in the rain. 

Rain is not guaranteed.  It is a gift to be cherished.  Being stewards of the land means also being stewards of our finite water resources.  It’s an imperative that ought to be obvious. All those lawn sprinklers tell me that, sadly, lessons have been too easily and quickly forgotten.

The Good, the Bad, and the Virtuous

There are three rain barrels connected to the downspouts around our house.  Those rain barrels are in use during the seven-month gardening season, after which they are drained and reside in our basement for the late autumn and winter months.  Because of those rain barrels (and coupled with recycling ‘gray water’), I can state with a clear conscience that not a single gallon of fresh water, pumped from our town’s underground watershed, was used last year in the maintenance of our large garden.  The same is true thus far this year.

The question is, is using a rain barrel an economical decision?  Or, is it one that we make because it’s the ‘green’ thing to do?

Our three rain barrels, all manufactured by the New England Rain Barrel Company, cost us a total of $145.  The least expensive one was purchased through a friend from the town of Dedham for $32.  The other two were purchased from the town of Medfield for $55 each.  All three purchases were subsidized by the state under a since-discontinued conservation program.  In the case of Dedham, the town further subsidized the cost.  At present, the company offers a 55 gallon rain barrel for $75 in ‘bulk deliveries’ to towns in Massachusetts; otherwise, a single rain barrel is $120.

This is the rain barrel that
waters our hostas

The beauty of a rain barrel is that it collects the rain that falls on a roof, flows into gutters, and goes into a downspout.  As little as a quarter-inch of rain falling on 350 square feet of roof will fill a 55 gallon barrel.  If there’s more than a quarter inch of rain, the downspout can be diverted so that the rainwater flows to wherever it would have flowed has the rain barrel not been collecting it.

Another rain barrel benefit is the water that you draw out of it.  It’s air temperature and chlorine free.  Your plants love it.

One of our rain barrels is tied to a drip hose and waters part of our hosta garden. I turn it on when the top two inches of the soil around the hostas is dry.  It takes about two days for the barrel to empty. Two of our rain barrels store water that will be used primarily to keep our 50-plus container gardens properly hydrated.  Since we can’t haul a rain barrel to the containers (55 gallons of water weighs 440 pounds), we fill a collection of two- and three-gallon plastic cat litter carriers; an innovative piece of recycling on our part.  Depending on the temperature and humidity, it can take between 20 and 40 gallons of water to ‘do’ all of our containers.

Let’s say, just to establish a baseline calculation, that each of our rain barrels are filled and emptied ten times over the course of the gardening season.  That’s 1650 gallons of water.  What did we save?

The answer is depressing.  In Medfield, ten thousand gallons of water costs $28.20.  Those 1650 gallons cost a little over $4.00.  The time to pay pack the initial purchase price of our rain barrels is 30 years.  If we lived in Boston, where ten thousand gallons of water is $57.30, the payback is a shorter, but still depressing, 15 years.  However, those barrels were purchased at a steep discount.  Had we paid $75 per barrel, the time to recover their cost would be 56 years; in Boston, 23 years.

Rain barrels also have one drawback that is not usually mentioned in the sales literature: unless they’re drained frequently, the water in a rain barrel can get rather dank.  Put less delicately, old rainwater smells and coats the inside of those cat litter containers with scum.  At the end of each season, any containers that are going to be over-wintered get bleached; the interiors of the rain barrels get washed thoroughly.

So, rain barrels are uneconomic and they can be a nuisance.  But they’re virtuous and, if your town has a water ban in place, they can also be a necessity.  Knowing what I know today (our rain barrels are six years old), would I buy them again? 

The answer: in a heartbeat.  They’re an easy way to practice conservation and to put water on your plants that is, well, pure rainwater.  Call it a small virtue.