A Rain Barrel!

Today I picked up a rain barrel (rain capture barrel) from Home Depot. We have a metal roof, and a LOT of rainwater drains off of it during the fall and winter months so I figured I should probably be capturing some of it.

I bought the barrel pictured here. It's a 57 gallon model with a standard hose-adapted faucet attached, which is handy. I don't find that I use a lot of water growing my plants, but my water usage for the bucket garden is roughly double what it takes to grow the plants once I account for all of the water I use for cleaning and sanitizing equipment.

City water is very cheap, so this is more of a conservation decision than an economic one. One more upside to using rainwater is that it is chlorine-free. I haven't actually captured and used any rainwater yet, so I don't know what the pH is.

I plan on using regular old drugstore hydrogen peroxide to sanitize the rainwater before it is used for plants.