The current (March 2010) issue of The Family Handyman magazine has a nice piece on making a water storage system from trash cans and common PVC fitings. Good stuff that you may be able to adapt. Look for it on the newsstands or at the library. Craigslist is a great resource but sometimes you need to be patient to find just what you are looking for. The holy grail for rain barrels are known as pickle or olive barrels. The entire top screws off so there basicly like 55 gallon mason jars. Being able to remove the top makes plumbing them up very easy. As far as using metal, many drums are epoxy lined and will resist rusting very well.

I do...in fact this summer I've only dragged the hose out to the greenhouse 2x, both times all I used it for was to fill the rain barrel. Sad, that I've only had to fill the rain barrel with the hose 2x :-( I either fill the watering can or gallon milk jugs from the rain barrel. I can water the greenhouse 2x from a full rain barrel and have a little left over for other things. It's far more convenient for me to use the rainbarrel, as it's right by the greenhouse (it fills from one side of the shed that the greenhouse is attached to). Sometimes the barrel gets slimy, but it's not difficult to use all the water out of it, wipe it clean, and put it back under the gutter drain. My water comes from a well where the water is icy cold, so it's much better for my peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes to use water that's above 50 degrees! DH has offered to fix up a hose from it, but I like the freedom of no hose...it might take a little while to fill the water jugs (but no time to fill the watering can), but it's faster watering out of them than it is a hose.

Just a tip for anyone who is thinking about making his/her own rain barrels. The rain barrels on the website Buford purchased from look really nice; however, we've learned at least one thing the hard way from the experience of making our own and that is not to put the spigot up so high on the barrel. Some of the pictures on the rainbarrelsandmore.com website show the spigots at about the midpoint of the barrel. What happens then is that fully half of the water in the barrel can't get out through the spigot. If you make your own barrel and are putting a water spigot on it, I'd suggest you put the spigot down as low as you can, then put the barrel itself up on top of a sturdy cement block, rock, or board platform that is high enough to allow you to put a bucket or watering can under the spigot. One other thing we've learned is that you really don't get much water pressure from these things, even when they're full of water and lifted up off the ground. In our community garden, we had planned to attach drip hoses to them that would be gravity fed, but they really don't have enough pressure to force the water down through a drip hose. So we water by hand with watering cans. You may wonder when you see the photos, so I'll just say that we're not using these barrels to collect rain, only to distribute water throughout the garden. But there are two things to think about when converting your barrel; 1)how will the water get inside of it and 2)how will you get the water out of it when you need it. From my own personal experience I also recommend cutting a hole in the top that is circular and just about as big in diameter as the barrel. The reason being, it allows you to pretty much climb inside the barrel to clean it out as needed. We've been using our barrels for only one season and I've had to clean algae off the insides quite a few times already. (not just from the inside of the semi-opaque white barrels in the picture but also from the inside of colored ones that the sun doesn't shine through) If you look up how-to directions for rain barrel conversions online, most of them will tell you to cut a smaller, rectangular hole in the top. And (again, my own experience - maybe yours will be better!) in addition to the smaller hole making it harder to keep the inside clean, I also found that opening up the whole top instead of just cutting a small square made it much easier to put in the spigot, and to reach around to put the spigot lower down on the side of the barrel. We're using plastic sheeting tied on top to keep out mosquitos, but if I were collecting rainwater from gutterspouts I think I would use a stiffer aluminum or plastic window screening with a hole cut in that to insert the gutterspout. And in case you're wondering, the plastic sheeting doesn't work that well (eventually cracks up because of sunlight exposure). It was just a cheap and quick fix. I'm hoping to be able to afford to use rolled window screening next year. Here is a link that might be useful: Photos of Homemade water barrels with spigots

Does anyone have a source for old wine barrels fully intact, not cut in half? Any help is greatly appreciated. Grancru