Rain barrels on winter break

They say that rain came yesterday, breaking the September drought, but I did not see it. Today when I was out and about the rain came. It was not much and it was not a hard rain but plants, worms and soil got much-needed rain water.

Rain water, I have been told, is better for plants than water from the faucet. It does not have the chemicals, like chlorine, that we add to faucet water. My rain barrels collecting rain from the roof of the house or garage, filtering it through the ‘tea’ bags of castings and into the garden, have not seen much rain this summer. I have had to add water from the hose to the rain barrels, let it sit for a day to distill the chemicals out of it before using it in the garden as ‘tea’

Like I said, the rain here was moderate. But on the news I saw terrible floods that claimed human lives in places like Georgia. They also need the rain but they had a hard rain, too much too fast for the ground to absorb.

In between the light rain today I gathered some buckets of wood chips from the city dump. Tomorrow I will place some on the compost pile out back and around the garden where the wood chips serving as mulch have composted into the soil. Wood chips in compost add small air pockets to the soil. Worms need air to live in the soil.

As mentioned in an earlier post, Just Add Water worms also need water to survive. They will die without water and without air pockets in the soil. So today I received two important ingredients for growing with worms, wood chips from the dump and rain waters from the sky. Rain and wood chips make soil worm-ready.

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