It's Water Harvesting Week, my friends. Here on the podcast, we have Martha Ritalic back.

Author of the new book, City Nature. Martha, we talked a little bit yesterday about

cisterns. Cisterns was something that, to be honest, I sort of, back in the day, I used to think,

oh, it's like some old Roman way of storing water. I had no concept of what it really meant

in today's world. And now that I have a 5,000 gallon cistern in my backyard, I realized

how silly I was back then. And we mentioned passive water harvesting in yesterday's episode.

We're now getting into active water harvesting. How would you differentiate the two? Because

what might say, hey, passive, I still had to dig the soil. I still had to dig the basin,

like, is that not, is that unactive? What's the difference? Well, active water harvesting features

unlike passive. They are human made and they don't blend into the landscape the way a passive water

harvesting landscape does. A cistern is quite noticeable. I've got a 1,500 gallon cistern. The

company name is Bushman. That thing stands out. And another thing about active water harvesting

systems is you don't have to wait for it to rain in order to use them. I get out early in the

morning like the 5 AM hour to water my two raised bed vegetable gardens. I can use that active

water harvesting system then or I can use it at 5 in the evening. All I have to do is open that

ball valve. I connect the ball valve with a short hose. This is the kind of a hose you use for

laundry supply line for your wash machine. And that goes into a watering can. And I fill up the

watering can and take it to where it's needed. Not the fastest way of watering, but it's kind of

like a morning meditation for me to fill up those, fill up those cans and take them over. First,

I start with a small bed with the sweet potatoes. And then I work on the big bed, which also has

four oils in it. Those are ceramic, unfinished ceramic containers that you pour water into

that soaks into the ground beneath the soil. So it's my morning meditation to fill the oils,

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