About Us
We are Jen and Chris Samuel, the owners of Therin Green Home Inc. We operate a couple of websites that are dedicated to green and healthy living at www.greenhomewellness.com and www.feelgoodwellness.com. Last year we moved in to a new house that has a great yard that we spend a lot of time in. Jen has recently become interested in the concept of square foot gardening which promotes a high yield garden with low resource usage and efficient use of space. We do not use any pesticides and the only fertilizer we use is from one of our 4 compost bins. The next natural step was to use as an irrigation system that adhered to our organic gardening plan.
It would be easy to use the water from our municipal system to water our plants but there is a major problem with this. The City of Ottawa uses Chloramine to treat the water we drink. Chloramine is “the other Chlorine” which bonds to organic matter such as bacteria and kills it to make water potable. There is much discussion about how much Chlorine or Chloramine is too much in our drinking water and how harmful it really is. We do know it makes your skin dry, your hair brittle and can cause chemically sensitive people to react negatively. Plants are organic matter and do not like Chlorine, they like natural rainwater. So in order to maximize our yield we decided that if it rain water that our garden wants then that is what it will get.
We have had a lot of fun trying out different configurations for out barrel and so far the most basic configuration has worked best for us. We ran into problems finding the best materials to build our barrels. We were not keen on spending $60-$120 on a brand new rain barrel from Home Depot, it seemed like too much money to spend on a flimsy plastic barrel with a cheap plastic spout on it. We have 2 kids who use these barrel for watering their own gardens and if you know any 4 year olds then you know that they can be rough on things that are not built well. So off we went to find heavy duty food grade olive barrels, if they can make it from Spain then they should survive in our yard. If you don’t know where to look finding these can be a bit of an adventure. The most difficult parts to find were were the solid brass taps. They were either too expensive or the wrong size or would require using toxic cements or caulking to make the seal water tight.
We think we have found a simple and inexpensive design for an effective residential rain barrel that I am sure is not unique. One thing that we have done that we think is pretty cool is that we have been able to build our barrel with parts that might have otherwise ended up in the landfill and they are still every bit as effective as the store bought models. Reduce, reuse and recycle right?
We are slowly building up listings to provide more information that promotes rain barrel use.If you know of a good resource for used barrels, have a photo of your barrel in action or just want to know more about rain barrels feel free to drop us a line.
Chris and Jen
