Its raining here and I know that it desperatley needed all over the country, especially the South.

Its still somewhat dissapointing to find that the soil will now be to wet to cultivate for a few days when for the first time ever my winter preparations were on track and I wasnt going to spend April and May playing catchup.

I use 2 x 1000litre caged IBT containers to collect rainwater off the allotments shed roof for use during the summer and indeed winter if required as our sites water is turned off during the winter. Only one of these is full whereas by now both are normally full and the excess is filling up 3 blue barrels that are linked together.

Is anybody else going to have to resort to using tap water this season for watering their plot as they are a bit short of rain water.

Yes - looks like it, which is a bit of a blow as we're on metred water at home. I've got several water butts and collect whatever rain is available, but there's precious little of it about this year.

I know we need the water but I am off today. So thought I would do a bit up the plot and it rains.

Oh well

I have just added another 120 gallons of storage to my home rainwater system. This is more useful financially than the storage at the farm as although they are both metered the charge at the farm is one third of that at home where for every gallon of water we pay for that and twice as much again as sewerage levy even though we are using it in the garden and not the loo. It's an unfair world.

Allan try asking the water board to reduce the sewerage proportion. They make an assumption that everyone puts the same proportion back into the sewer, but (as far as I know) you can challenge the proportion for your account. We succesfully challenged ours, but it was clear cut as we are not on the mains sewer!