We Started Water Harvesting. Finally.

Last Spring we bought this water harvesting barrel, and never got to setting it up. It was quite easy. Here's a beak down of what we did. 

1. Pick a Place. 2. Measure barrel (to the top of the barrel). 3. Cut drain (to the point you measured) 4. Put the Barrel under the drain 5. Enjoy.

Like I said, seriously simple. So why are we water harvesting? Here are our top 10 reasons we water harvest!

#1 It was super simple to get started!

#2 It's free (almost) and there is so much of it! For every inch of rain on a 2K squarefoot roof, 1,250 gallons of water can be reused. Pretty awesome.

#3 Most people use 3K gallons of water a week to maintain their lawn, we figure, waste not want not. The grass is happy and we save 1/2 the gallons with just one barrel. Plus, it's better for landscape growth!

#4 This leads to......reduced water bills!

#5 It's a small action that makes a large impact. 

#6 Water harvesting is easy to maintain. You don't need to buy a bunch or replenish filters.

#7 It doesn't take up a lot of space, yet holds a lot of water.

#8 It provides an emergency supply of water.

#9 It's convenient because we don't have a hose where we want to plant some beds.

#10 We don't feel bad "wasting" water.

 

Weirdo Things Are Happening

Perhaps Mother Nature has hear about the internal fouls in Casa Katsaros. Perhaps she wanted to chip in and add to the chaos. In the form of garlic, of course.  

So the garlic I planted back in winter looked a little sad, so I decided to check her out. 

Um, is this normal? It's like a colony of onions, not a bulb of garlic. 

Has anyone had this happen to them? Did I prematurely pick my garlic, and this is totally normal? Or is this, like, some mutant weirdness and the whole batch is a failure?

This Weekend Was For The Birds!

How was your weekend? Did you get a chance to watch Secrets from a Stylist and Design Star? I was over-indulging in my two favorite shows for sure. Super excited to see Emily do a bedroom, and fell in love with the $11K headboard in the first look. I am also not quite sure how I feel about the new picks from Design Star. I knew I totally loved David, Emily and Antonio from day one....not really feeling anyone right now from this season. We'll see. We will see.

So yea, this weekend! We went to Long Island to this park we go to every year to welcome back the Ducks and Geese from Winter. We were super late this year, yea we know. Much to our surprise, Gerry Park looked like a train wreck. This park was AMAZING just last year. Now.....let the picture tell the story....

So you can see everything is super overgrown and hard to walk to. And it was swampy. Gross. Totally bummed us out. None the less, we had to feed our feathered friends, and as soon as we whipped out the bread bag, they came flocking!

How super cute is that little guy above? I wanted to take him home. After feeding the ducks and geese, we did what we always do, as per tradition, and went to The Jolly Fisherman where we dined amongst 65+ year olds and laughed our booties off before we headed back to Westchester. 

When we returned home, I decided to pick the raspberries we have growing in our side yard. Last year I was too late and all the birds snatched them up!

I was excited that I found a bunch of great tasty berries. Joey called them poison berries. 

I didn't have enough to make a pie, but I am very much going to experiment with some mini doughnuts and these bad boys. In the spirit of instant gratification,  I did use them as garnish in some cheese plates I made for us later that night. 

We totally did some DIY homey stuff this weekend, but we flopped and failed. We'll tell you all about it this week.

Have you fudged something up recently? Let us know we aren't alone!