Hello, steemians, and welcome to da greenhouse, eh!
Today's post is about setting up my water barrel in the greenhouse for the season. I use this barrel for watering the tomato plants with drip irrigation by gravity feed. I had the barrel in a different place last year, basically where the heat wall is now.
The first thing I had to do is build a stand for the barrel that was tall enough to be higher than the top of the tomato pots, so that the water will flow out of the barrel even when it's almost empty. For this, I used cement blocks stacked in a double row and leveled off. The stand is approximately 2 feet by 2 feet on the top to accommodate the 55 gallon barrel.
I bought a 2X8 and cut it into 2 foot sections to lay across the top of the blocks for a platform for the barrel to sit on.
Then I just put the barrel on the platform with the drain valve facing the easiest access point for attaching a hose to it.
The only thing left to do to complete this simple project was to fill the barrel with water. I normally fill the barrel with rain water in the summer, but it's only rained once since I set up the rain collection system so there wasn't enough water in the rain barrels to fill this barrel. I just filled it with city water with the hose. I made a handy filler dohickey last year for transferring water without the hose coming out of the barrel that I'm filling, so I found that and used it to fill the barrel.
I'll leave the water sit in the barrel for a few days to warm up and evaporate the chlorine before I use it on the tomato plants. It seems that the temperature of the water that you use on the plants makes a difference to the growth of the plants. They don't like their feet being cold either.
The next thing I need to do in the greenhouse is to set up the drip irrigation pipe on the containers for the tomato plants, but that's a pretty simple thing to do.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by and checking out my post, eh!
As always, feel free to leave a comment or a question if you would like.
May the Steem Force be with you!
