Homegrown New Hampshire host Emma Erler, lead horticulturist with Kirkwood Gardens, says setting up a rain barrel is fairly easy. But don’t expect it to help in a drought.
“Rain barrels are wonderful for the periods in between periods of rain to capture the rainwater to use in your garden,” she says. But it’s not a total remedy for dry conditions.
“If you’re not getting any rain at all, your rain barrel won’t fill up,” she says.
“Basically, what you’re trying to do is collect all the water you can off of the hard surfaces on your property, like your roof,” says Erler. “You set up a barrel underneath the downspout of your gutter to be able to make use of that water.”
There are a lot of options for rain barrels, including ready-made kits, and there are plans and advice online or in books on how to create your own rain barrel.
Ideally, you’ll want to elevate the barrel on blocks or pavers so that you can use gravity to get all the water out of the barrel, either into a watering can or into drip hoses.
To keep out small animals, and to prevent the rain barrel from becoming a mosquito breeding ground, it should have some sort of screening across the top.
Because the water collected is coming off your roof, consider where you’ll be using it. You may want to use the non-potable water that comes out of your rain barrel only in your landscape beds, where you have flowers, not in your vegetable beds, where you’ll be harvesting crops to eat.
“There could be animal droppings on the roof from birds or squirrels,” Erler says. “You could be getting leached chemicals off of whatever your roofing material is. If you have asphalt shingles, that’s potentially chemicals that you don’t want to consume yourself.”
She says if you are going to use the collected water in an edible garden, be very careful to try to keep the water off of the foliage and fruit by either watering the soil directly with your watering can or setting up a drip irrigation system.
At the end of the season, you’ll need to fully drain the barrel and clean it out with either soapy water or disinfectant solution and then store it upside down for the winter. Simply clean it up, put it away, and bring it out again the next year.
While setting up a rain barrel helps lessen your use of municipal or well water, there are other preventative steps to take as well.
“We’ve talked about it before,” says Erler, “but mulching your garden is so, so important. A thick mulch layer is going to help keep the moisture in the soil for longer, so that hopefully you don’t have to water as often, especially in a drought.”
See you in the garden.
If you have a gardening question for Homegrown NH, email or send a voice memo to HomegrownNH@NHPR.org.
Homegrown New Hampshire is a collaboration between Squam Lakes Natural Science Center and NHPR.
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