For those of you concerned about the safety of Mark's jack-support hack --- don't worry, he's going to beef up the tower some more.

In the meantime, I wanted to let a little rain flow into the IBC tank to get an idea for how much precipitation it would take to fill the reservoir. The photo above was taken in the middle of the rain event, but, much to my distress, even after the full 1.2 inches fell, the tank still looked nearly empty.

"You know, we only have the tank plumbed to a small section of the roof," Mark reminded me. True, but surely a 50-square-foot section of roof was enough to fill up an IBC tank in short order? Time for a little math! 275 gallons of capacity equals 63,525 cubic inches. Divide that by the 7,200 square inches of roof area we have plumbed to the tank...and it would require nearly 9 inches of rainfall to fill 'er up.

Which is actually good news, although the realization will make more work for Mark. There's another nearby gutter section currently draining into what has turned into a swamp along the backside of the trailer. If we add another T and include this gutter into the IBC-collection line, then we should be able to fill up the tank with only 4.5 inches of rainfall (while drying up problematic ground). That means we'd fill the tank up every month on average, giving us plenty of water to keep the mushroom logs below well hydrated. Back to work!