Welcome back my friends to Water Harvesting Week here on the Epic Gardening podcast with Martha

Ritalic, the author of City Nature. So we've kind of overlooked a bit of your background here Martha

because while you are an author you also do quite a bit of other projects and work and so what's

your background just generous speaking? I'm a photographer designer and writer and part of my

reason for doing the Water Harvesting Fed landscape here is I spend a great deal of time I'm working

at home I'm in front of a screen you need to take eye breaks and I wanted to look at something

beautiful and this landscape and the gardens here are a tremendous source of aesthetic inspiration for me to the

point where in 2018 I upgraded my camera system and the new camera system was a challenge and I bought

it in June of 2018 and instead of going out in public and stumbling and fumbling around with it I

decided it is time to open the backyard photography school learn how to use this thing so out to the

backyard I went to the garden to the fruit trees the natural trees the cactus et cetera and I

figured that after a few weeks of doing this I'd get bored and moved on to some other topic and that

is not what happened during that summer I went back east to visit my elderly mother who did know it

at the time but she was in her final year of life I took the camera with me and I started going

around the neighborhood since mom couldn't walk out of the house anymore I went out to be her

photographer in the neighborhood to show her what was going on and with all that practice with that

camera I got it and so mom died in the summer of 2019 and I continued on with this yard I called

it my yard documentation project and in 2020 I decided to get really serious about it and produce a

book and shot thousands and thousands and thousands of thousands and thousands with photos narrowed

them down to just over 60 with a mentor and the photos you see in city nature are brought to you by

water harvesting I love it I love it it's it's such a good example of the benefits after you sort

of build an ecosystem because what you're talking about is not only just harvesting water repurposing

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