recycling times 2

[post by Pat]

This ultimate recycling project was inspired by an old hose.

The point of having a rain barrel is not only to collect the rain, but to actually use it. Well, we got tired of bending over and filling up watering cans and then lugging them up and down and around the yard. Then last year was so rainy we didn’t really use them. But the heat and lack of rain this year has made us want to take full advantage of every drop. And at the same time, our 20-year old hose was starting to pop in places from the pressure of city water. In the past, Jim would just cut off the offending section and replace the connector. At this rate our once 100-foot hose was rapidly getting shorter! This year, Jim reluctantly agreed that it was time to get a new hose, but he still didn’t want to get rid of the old one. Well, you know that necessity is the mother of invention. He cut the hose in half, and attached each half to the spigot on the rain barrels. Nice recycling, eh? It gets better. He went rummaging in the garage and found some old metal fence posts and a couple of wall brackets that once held a ladder and fashioned not one but two nifty hose hangers by zip tying a bracket to each fence post. He sunk each one in the ground by a barrel and looped the hose over the bracket. All we needed to buy was one hose end connector and two simple sprinkler heads.

The good news is that we now can water all the pots along that side of the house and all the pots on the patio directly from the rain barrels – no more filling watering cans. The bad news is that now Jim wants to put more hosta in pots!