Fun with water barrels

It didn’t take long for us to get the barrels up. and just wait until you see the first one!

Jim kicked it off by getting blocks to put them on, leveling the ground, preparing the downspouts… he brought back some green spray paint… specially designed for coating plastic (so they said). It worked great. Four cans coated both white barrels in a nice hunter green.

barrel top unpainted

We decided we would add a colorful, homey touch to the barrels. Something to celebrate nature. Something unique and vibrant.The solution was to grab 6-year-old Grace and her best friend Seville and turn them loose with some paint. they got too far, I told them why we got the barrels. We bought them from the Cumberland River Compact, that nice organization that tries to preserve our precious streams, rivers and lakes.I told them I hoped some of the $40 spent on the barrels would go to help the people at the compact do their work… and that by getting the barrels we were doing our part to use roof water to water our garden. If we didn’t do that, they’d take stream, river or lake water to chemically treat for drinking and THEN we would put it on our garden. A waste of nice rivers and streams!

 

The girls got to work and before long, they had a beautiful secret land between two waterfalls with lots of natural beasts living around it. There was a turtle, some fish… even a bee’s nest in a tree.

Love it.

spraying the barrels

 

 

Grace and Seville’s barrel

Grace and Seville's barrel