Rain Barrels, Composters and Gardens

So for some reason since we moved onto the Hartzog Homestead I have become very interested in some minor self sufficient lifestyle tasks. While I think it would be awesome to lead a completely self suffcient lifestyle, I think the reality is that we won't. But it's still fun to do our part to become less dependent on a few things you would normally just buy from someone else.

One of my most recent projects was this rotating composter. I ran across this on the internet, which is where I do most of my research. I built a large composting bin last year out of old crates but I saw this and had to make it since I had the materials sitting around. It's made from a 55 gallon drum, a piece of rebar, and a couple of 4 x 4 posts I found. You throw your scraps in there and give it a twirl. I haven't had this one long enough to know how well it actually works but it looks good in the garden none the less. Just to the right of the picture you can see our cucumber vine growing up the tee pee arbor.

This is my 275 gallon water cistern. This was last year's project that started out as a 55 gallon drum. I quickly discovered I could fill up a 55 gallon drum in about 15 minutes of good rain so naturally I had to expand this project. I'm glad I did. So far this year we havn't had to use any city water to keep our many plants and our garden growing.

I bought this drum thinking I would not need the metal cage that normally comes with it...I was very wrong. Since most of my projects involve recycled lumber and materials you can see that I opted to build this very attractive wooden cage to keep the cistern from warping when full of water. It's definitely a project I have to revisit when I come up with something better looking.

I have a 3/4 HP submersible sump pump inside the cistern that I found on clearance somewhere. When I plug in the pump it will pump very easily uphill to our garden. I really wanted it to be a gravity fed system but with all the trees we have our garden had to be where it is, which is not close to the downspouts and is on the high side of our yard. You can see the white PVC pipe with the green water hose attached to it. That leads up to the garden.

This barrel was the original one I had attached to the downspout. It now sits in the garden and I pump to it with the sump pump mentioned before. The other day I built a drip system using 3/4" PVC pipe and 1/2" black tubing. I didn't have a good pic of the entire system so you can't see the tubing here but the system works great. It's gravity fed from the barrel, most drip systems are pressurized. I had to drill holes in the black pipe that were large enough to drip with only the weight of the water in the barrel. I love it because I can pour my fertilizer directly into the barrel and turn on the drip system and I don't have to stand there and water the garden by hand.

Here are some pics Kimberly took of our Better Boy tomatoes. These pics are about 2 weeks old now so we should have some good and ripe fruit soon.

These are our first grape tomatoes. We also planted cucumber, watermelon and a bell pepper plant. I planted lima beans but not a single seed sprouted. That's two years straight that my beans flopped. I guess they're my huckleberry. I'm going to keep trying though.

This next project I'm seriously considering...chickens!