What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Today I'm taking a question from

Nikil, who actually has a lot of questions and I'm going to do a couple of them over the next few

days. First of all, let's get some housekeeping out of the way. Today and

tomorrow are the last days to enter this month's giveaway, which is for a Baker Creek

Airloom Seed collection.

So you can go to epic gardening.com forward slash giveaways

to enter that and good luck if you do that.

OK, so let's get to the question.

Today, Nikil asks, what is the difference between tap water and rain water?

Which is a great question.

A lot of people have this question.

Do not know the answer.

I didn't know the answer at one point in time,

so let's get to it.

The basic premise here is that all water provided to our plants are not equal.

Most gardeners can see that rain is more beneficial

than tap water, but they don't really know why.

So first of all, we need to look at tap water. What is in it? So first of all there's

chlorine. Chlorine is necessary to kill bacteria in our city water. The amount of

chlorine that is present has a very, very small effect on plants.

And if you leave it out, as in if you leave the water out,

chlorine will actually escape water as a gas over the course of maybe 24-ish

...