Saturday I had the ladder against the shop gutter with a coffee can full of the grey sludge that collects in the first-flush diverter, and Ruth’s voice in my ear from the phone call the night before, asking if her wooden well lid was supposed to smell like the creek after that hard rain. In my experience, it seems to work best if you clean the ball and the seat before the season. Mine had a summer’s worth of dust and one pine cone wedged where the ball should sit. The barrel feeds the garden only. Anything for the house comes out of the well, through the pressure tank, and gets tested before it gets trusted.
I keep thinking about the log jam on the St. Croix in 1886, the one a local reporter called the jammedest jam he had ever met. Hundreds of men, six weeks, steamboats and finally dynamite to clear it. My diverter is the same problem at kitchen scale. Water moves fine until one thing lodges where it should not, and then the whole system is the jam. The men on the river could not have fixed it by wishing the logs smaller. They had to climb in and pull the one that held the rest.
Len says I overthink a garden barrel. He is a plumber, he thinks in pressure and pipe dope, and he is not wrong that the stakes are low. But the habit is the point. The same hands that clear the diverter in October are the ones that will not skip the drum rotation in the spring. Rain Catchment for Non-Potable Use is where I keep the reasoning, but the reasoning is short: keep the first dirty water out, and the rest of the barrel stays something you can put on beans.
The myth is that rain off a roof is clean. Looks are free and they are worth about that.
Before the first real storm, the barrel setup for garden water wants the same ten minutes mine got. Pull up the video and watch the full video while you do the job, step by step, with your own hands on your own fittings.
The coffee can of sludge went on the compost, the ladder went back on its hooks, and the barrel is ready for whatever the sky sends. What I have not answered for myself is whether Ruth’s lid smell is the rain or the well, and I will not know until Marta reads the bottle.