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  • Mother Earth Gardener

    RAINWATER HARVESTING A Better System

    Dec 08, 2017 5 minutes
    By Cheryl Long Illustrations by Elayne Sears

    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

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