Sustainable Veggie Garden In the Making

So our dream became reality when we found our “patch” in Belmont Village for our “farm” (I can’t help but put quotes around he word farm because farmers would laugh if they see how small ours is!)  If you don’t already know, farming doesn’t pay-off economically when you consider all that goes into it.  I imagine most farmers in the U.S. get government subsidies, except for the small farmers which is why I can appreciate our local farmer’s market.  The basic expense is water.  Those plants drink a lot of water before they can give birth to beautiful veggies for your enjoyment! :-) So, that was our first challenge – how do we sustain this “farm” and minimize our water bill?  And as we all know, water gets more expensive the more you use it! If only we can capture the abundant rain water from the winter months and use it in the summer months.  Off we went trying to figure out what is available to contain the rain water with visions of a farm having a lot of thirsty plants to water.  We found 250 gallon containers previously used to hold veggie oil for diesel fuel (I love the creativity out there for alternative fuel sources!)…we got 9 of them.  We were ready for 2000 gallons of rain water.  And boy, did we get it that winter!  It was a good feeling feeding our veggies with the rain water that summer.  The rain water lasted 2 ½ months which didn’t quite cover the full summer season, but not bad for the first try!  More to come on this topic.  I want to hear about you success stories (or attempts) at rain water harvesting at this time.