Installing a water butt

Festive wishes to readers out there, I hope you're having a peaceful time of it. I'm cracking on with jobs that will make our lives easier in the coming growing season. I'd been wanting to install guttering on our allotment shed for some time now. It's a long walk to the the water butt and when times are busy and lots of people are on site you can't use it anyway as it doesn't refill very quickly.

I don't mind admitting that do-it-yourself jobs are not one of my talents. Frankly, the prospect of having to do these things is often quite terrifying!

This information might be useful to someone though, so I'm going to share my progress so far. As a first step, I checked out the 'how to' guides for some major stores. B and Q being one of them. I didn't find much about how to install guttering but I did find a step-by-step guide to installing a water butt. Here's the link:

Then I visited a large store and bought the necessary items. Three lengths of guttering, plus brackets. Water butt and stand I'd bought a while back. Down pipe and down pipe connector. So far so good. Cost around £40.

Of course when I visited our plot yesterday allotment reality started to kick in. I put the brackets on the shed - I thought they were sloping and tested the system out with water from a watering can. However, then I realised the shed was sloping too, so had to take the brackets off and put them on again in a different place. Sigh. By the time I'd tried again night was falling and it was freezing cold, so I guess Installing a Water Butt (Episode II) will have to wait a wee while. Never mind, at least I've started the project.

And the snow drops I planted are coming up.