I am excited to see that the City of Richmond is encouraging residents to start composting by offering a high quality composting container for a great price. Terrific idea! Here's a suggestion for their next offering:
A rain barrel.
Dry spells during Richmond summers are pretty common. Water restrictions are no fun for anyone concerned about their landscape, but when you're growing food that your family eats it's even more frustrating. Rainwater harvesting is a very practical approach to reducing your municipal or well water use for landscaping. Water can be stored and reserved for dry spells, or it can be used to supplement irrigation with municipal or well water. I plan on investing in at least one of these next spring but I think it would be just great if the city could repeat their discount composter deal with rain barrels.
Rainwater harvesting is actually pretty interesting and the systems available can be very ambitious , like huge cisterns with pumps and filtrations systems that are designed to supplement the entire household water supply or systems that use rainwater for toilet flushing. However, considering that up to 40% of household water use is for landscaping in Summer months, a simple rain barrel (or two) seems like it could have a lot of impact, both on municpal water supply and on the wallet. Additionally, rainwater is often softer and freer of contaminants than the water from the city or a well, and there's no chlorine. That makes it easier on your plants. I found some interesting links on rain water harvesting here , here , and here . If anyone reading this has any experience with rain water collection for irrigation I'd love to get some feedback.
