When it does launch, it will feature one success tip every day. This tip might be a poem, a song, a quote, an article, a book, or a YouTube video. Whatever strikes my fancy. For now, though, all that’s here is a lot of empty space.

• To test the excerpt feature.
• To test archives.
• To put an image in the excerpt.
• Etcetera. Etcetera.

To do this, I need to find an image. I also need to fill this space up with text. This is text. Let me go find an image.

Images need work
Apparently the default spacing around images in this template is minimal. I’ll have to fix that. I like a nice buffer around my photos so that they don’t feel crowded. One or more is attached to the house’s downspout; the rest of the barrels are linked to the first ones to collect their overflow when it’s really raining.

Get this: if you have 1,000 square feet of roof surface area, then one inch of rainfall will produce over 600 gallons of rainwater. How big is your roof? I have my rain barrel hooked up to our detached garage (an old carriage house), and its roof is about 300 square feet. If you cut that in half (I’m only getting the rain from half the roof) and do the math, my 60-gallon rain barrel will be filled by just two-thirds of an inch of rainfall. In Oregon, that’s easy! The overflow drains through a tube that I have draped under the boxwood hedge, or I could collect it in a secondary container.

Convenience
Our 3/5-acre lot has a grand total of one outside spigot, right by the house. Watering the far reaches of the gardens (vegetable, fruit, and flower) requires lugging hoses across the lawn and around trees. With the rain barrel at the garage, I can easily fill a watering can or bucket for the flower beds for some quick spot watering. While the gravity-fed flow of the rain barrel isn’t typically enough pressure to power a sprinkler, it would be enough for a short soaker hose. A rain barrel by the patio would be ideal for watering potted flowers and container plants near the house.

There. That should do it.