RAINWATER HARVESTING A Better System
HARVESTING RAINWATER TO USE for growing vegetables makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, the most common method of rainwater harvesting isn’t the most effective. Typically, gardeners invest in a rain barrel — which holds only 50 or 60 gallons of water — and then dole out the captured water to plants as needed, hopefully emptying the barrel before the next storm.
But 50 gallons is only a small fraction of the water you could be harvesting each time it rains. During a storm that drops 1 inch of rain, more than 900 gallons of water flow off the roof of a 30-by-50-foot house or barn. Instead of catching just a little bit of water in a rain barrel, why not capture it all? You can do
