The Yellow Fern: Rain Chain

We have been slowly whittling away at the screen porch..it’s getting pretty close to being finished. There are just a lot of little details to finish out the project. We got all the gutters up a couple weeks ago and installed my rain chain! It replaces the downspout, so when it rains the little cups fill up with water and the water flows down to the next one. Making a really pretty trickling noise and it looks kinda like a waterfall. We needed to somehow direct the rain away from the house once it trickled down the chain. I knew I wanted a really big clay pot and as always, my ever impressive engineer husband devised a plan.
So, we went to a nursery where they have a TON of different huge clay pots. There were so many to choose from and they were all so neat but we chose the prettiest, tallest one. I just love the colors! (it's kinda dirty here but it's teal dripped into dark blue)

Any who, Ryan made an incognito French drain out of the clay pot and cut a hole about 3 inches in diameter in the bottom. Then he poured a small concrete slab for the pot to sit on and for the drain pipe to come up through. He layed PVC pipe in the ground and it goes from the concrete slab to the backside of our stone retaining wall. So all the water trickles down the rain chain, into the clay pot, down the drain and under/out the other side of the wall. We also got some wire mesh and put it down in the pot to catch leaves and debris. That way the drain doesn't get clogged up from our thousands of acorns and leaves that fall. By looking at it you would never know..it just looks like a chain and a clay pot!

Eventually we are going to plant a nice little garden around it. But here it is...