Brimful

Three weeks ago, I was obsessing about the rain [lack of] and how disconcertingly crisp was the yard after a no-rain July. The rain gods delivered a steady drizzle on the 3rd August and then buggered off back to the tropics. On 27th August we were part of a yellow rainfall-with-thunder warning. I took The Beloved to the Dublin train, acquired some groceries, and got back home by 10:00am. Just as the heavens opened. It's not Winter, so I instanter stripped down to shorts [no, not me undies USAians] and a T-shirt, seized my biggest azada, and spent 30 minutes beefing up the berms which divert water from the surface of the lane into the parallel drain. It rained steady for the next 4 hours, at the end of which 37mm of rain had fallen. That's an inch and half or about 5% of the annual average rainfall in East Ireland.  Over the 10:00 to 10:00 24 hours about 44mm fell. And we are forecast for more rain in reasonable amounts over the next week, 

By skipping about between my various pumps, siphons and containers, we are now back to full capacity:

• 2200 lt - 2x 1tonne IBC 
• 200 lt - 1 large herring barrel
• 330 lt - 3x med herring barrels
• 240 lt - 1 blue stable-barrow [R bot]
• 100 lt - 1 orange movers packing crate [R top]
• 100 lt - misc 20lt buckets
• 3 tonnes total 

In June I was delighted to score some as-new bright orange food grade buckets with snap lids [R top]. Hill-walking friends-and-neighbours came by to harvest some hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor seed to put brakes on the grass in their lawn. We had a great time, thrashing the standing plants into buckets until we had a few hundred grams of mostly hay-rattle seed. Bonus: misc other wildflowers. I expressed admiration for the buckets they had brought for this purpose and two days later six as-new buckets appeared over the gate into our yard. Mick was quietly pleased to be presenting orange buckets to the local Prod. But I am colour-blind in these matters: and not all protestants sport a sash.