Water collection

One of the more urgent items on my to-do list is guttering to collect water and direct it into my water butt (collected from Polmadie dump and is my best find). The water butt by itself collected about a centimetre of water over two or three weeks, which is fairly pathetic. No wonder as its surface area is less than a square metre.

So I rigged up some guttering to flow round the shed from the compost bins, round the back and then back along to the water butt. You can see the end of it below.

There are little holes to be plugged where nails have been bashed through the guttering at some point and a join that's not water-tight, but it's working. It's not rained for a while, but over the course of a day or so of wet weather it collected 10cm or so of water. It's not rained since of course, but that amount has got me through more than a week of watering seedlings and seeds.

I raised the butt up so that I could get my watering can in.

The final touch will be connecting the down pipe to the end of the gutter. That will guide water down, rather than rely on gravity (that's not so good on windy days when mini water falls can be blown off course). I also need to add a lid to keep detritus out, or so the books say. That's low on my list.