Oodles and oodles of rain!  Day after day of dreary drizzle or pouring rain.  We want to sift more garden clay but the clay is so wet it's clumping.  Put in Dragon's Egg cucumber seeds a few days ago when I found a short period with no showers.  Eighteen of the twenty potato plants are up and thriving.  Sugar snap peas are sending out tendrils to climb their fence.  As soon as they open  their sweet lavender blossoms, the deer will visit the garden.

Last year I bought an Earth Minded rain barrel but we didn't get it hooked up because we weren't sure how to do what we needed to do for our "gentle sloping" back yard.  Yesterday we visited Home Depot and were told what we needed and how to set it up.

This is just the preliminary set up.  We still need to level the ground and steady the barrel but Cliff needed to see how the pipes would connect and where they would require support.

Right now the PVC's are resting on my garden chair, an upside down flower pot, and some old logs.  

The brown PVC is connected to the house spout and rests in the concrete block.  We installed a decreaser down to 46 feet of inch-and-a-half  PVC all the way down to the barrel.  Now that we can see it, we know what else we need to buy and how to finish.  It's a smaller version of the "Alaskan Pipeline."

I'm so thrilled that my joints are not inflamed and I'm able to be outside all the time, sometimes even in the rain.  Last year the front garden was so neglected and overgrown with weeds and unwanted plants.  A few weeks ago I started cleaning it up and mulching, laying rock borders, and fixing the rock wall.  The butterfly bushes need to come out.  I think the February freezing damaged them.

When I can get some new bushes in the ground, I can continue cleaning and mulching.

Dogwoods are in bloom throughout the woods.

                                                Tatsoi
It's raining gently again so I just went down to the rain barrel, lifted the lid, to watch the rain flow in.  Nothing's happening yet. 

90 minutes later.................

The rain barrel is 1/3 full!