Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2, 2nd Edition – in color
Water-Harvesting Earthworks
This best-selling, award-winning book is a how-to guide enabling you to “plant the rain” by creating water-harvesting “earthworks” or “rain gardens.” Earthworks are simple, inexpensive strategies and landforms that passively harvest multiple sources of free on-site water including rainfall, stormwater runoff, air conditioning condensate, and greywater within “living sponges” of soil and vegetation. The plants then pump the water back out in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, timber and forage, while controlling erosion, reducing down-stream flooding, dropping utility costs, increasing soil fertility, and improving water and air quality. Using these strategies you can create vibrant gardens and landscapes watered primarily, or even solely, by your harvest of free on-site waters.
This massively revised and enhanced full-color second edition builds on the information in Volume 1 by showing you how to turn your yard, school, business, park, ranch, and neighborhood into lively, regenerative producers of resources. Conditions at home will improve as you simultaneously enrich the ecosystem and inspire the surrounding community.
Learn to select, place, size, construct, and plant your chosen earthworks. All is made easier and more effective by illustrations of natural patterns of water and sediment flow with which you can collaborate or mimic. Detailed step-by-step instructions with over 550 images show you how to do it, and plentiful stories of success motivate you so you will do it!
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 3
Roof Catchment and Cistern Systems
Cisterns harvesting runoff from rooftop catchments have the potential to harvest the highest quality rainwater runoff on site, and allow for the greatest range of potential uses for that water. Water uses range from irrigation to fire protection, bathing, washing, maintaining natural creek and spring flow in dry times and potable water for drinking.
Building on the information presented in Volume 1, this book shows you how to select, size, design, build, or buy and install cistern systems harvesting roof runoff. Guiding principles unique to such systems are presented along with numerous tank options, and design strategies that will improve water quality, save you money, reduce maintenance, and expand the ways you can use your tanks and the water harvested within.
Eat Mesquite and More
A Cookbook for Sonoran Desert Foods and Living
This Southwest Books of the Year pick celebrates native food forests of the Sonoran Desert and beyond with over 170 recipes featuring wild, indigenous foods, including mesquite, acorn, barrel cactus, chiltepin, cholla, desert chia, desert herbs, and flowers, desert ironwood, hackberry, palo verde, prickly pear, saguaro, wolfberry, and wild greens. The recipes—contributed by desert dwellers, harvesters, chefs, and innovators—capture a spirit of adventure and reverence inviting both newcomers and seasoned experts to try new foods and experiment with new flavors.
More than a cookbook, this guide also encourages a renaissance of “wild agriculture,” one that foregrounds the ethical harvesting and selection of wild foods and the re-planting of native food sources in urban and residential areas without imported water or fertilizers. It contains stories of significant individuals, organizations, and businesses that have contributed knowledge, products, and innovation in the planting, harvesting, and use of wild, native desert foods. Additional essays reveal the poetry of the foraging life, how to plant the rain, and medicinal uses and ethnobotanical histories of desert plants.
For more details and ordering info, editions in other languages, electronic editions, additional publications, Plant the Rain wearables, videos, and much more see HarvestingRainwater.com.
A Request
Did you enjoy Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond?
If so, please help spread the word by posting a review on Goodreads, Amazon, and/or where you bought it, such as in a local bookstore’s (and/or your) social media. And talk it up as you speak to others while planting the rain.
Thanks!