Rainwater harvesting

     We attended a talk on "Rainwater Harvesting" today given by Keith Hamm of and at Living Earth Landscapes in Arcata, CA.  We have been talking about the possibilities of capturing rainwater during the wetter months and using it to water our garden in the drier months.  The difficulty of course is storage.
     We have an elementary system at present that works well.  I've been using it over the past several months whenever I have used a water soluble fertilizer (Maxsea) in the garden.  I use this fertilizer quite a bit because I believe in the "mudding in" method of transplanting.  I simply put the fertilizer in a garden watering can and then fill it from the tap using the recycled rainwater.  We collect the rainwater from one of our downspouts on the house.  It flows into a rainwater catchment, like a garbage can, which has a spigot on the bottom.  Here are pictures of the valve on the downspout, and of the catchment.

Mr. Hamm talked about systems that could be used with far more extensive use of rainwater.  We discussed underground catchment systems, ponds, and Australian systems.  It was fascinating.  If we had $15,000 to use we figured we could have quite a nice system and use rainwater exclusively.