Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1:
Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life and Landscape

AVAILABLE NOW! Order here.

Selected Content, Including Appendix 6 Resources

Praise for Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1Additional Testimonials

Book Reviews

Book Awards

Book Specs

Turn water scarcity into water abundance! Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1 is the core of the complete three-volume guide on how to conceptualize, design, and implement sustainable water-harvesting systems for your home, landscape, and community. This book enables you to access your on-site resources (rainwater, greywater, topsoil, sun, plants, and more), gives you a diverse array of strategies to maximize their potential, and empowers you with guiding principles to create an integrated, multi-functional, and water-sustainable water-harvesting landscape plan specific to your site and needs. Clearly written with more than 40 photos and 115 illustrations, this volume helps bring your site to life, reduce your cost of living, endow yourself and your community with skills of self-reliance and cooperation, and create living air conditioners of vegetation growing beauty, food, and wildlife habitat. Stories of people who are successfully welcoming rain into their life and landscape will invite you to do the same!

Water harvesting and water cycling. © 2005 Brad Lancaster and Joe Marshall

Selected Content

• Table of contents
• Foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan
• Sample Gallery of Book’s Illustrations
• Appendix 3 Water-harvesting Calculations (128k PDF)
• Appendix 4 Example Plant Lists and Water-Requirement Calculations for Tucson, Arizona (128k PDF)
• Appendix 6 Resources

Praise for Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1

“Through some bizarre irony, rainwater in the arid west is typically deflected away from water-starved land and shunted off to storm drains. Not so in Brad Lancaster’s universe. He welcomes rainwater into the landscape with creativity, intelligence and humor and puts it to use growing food, shading houses, reducing erosion, improving wildlife habitat, and enriching the urban environment. In Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, he welcomes us to join him in exercising the radical common sense of harvesting rainwater.”

- Ann Phillips, Manager of Restoration Projects, Tucson Audubon Society

“Buy this book now. If you live in a dry place, buy it. If you live somewhere subject to droughts (which is everywhere), buy it. The simple techniques (and the principles behind them) can help you save bunches of money, and make the landscape around you more productive and beautiful, with less work and upkeep than you can imagine. Lend it to your neighbors, and you’ll benefit as well. (Heck-buy them each a copy.) This how-to manual has enough stories, illustrations and simple ideas to inspire even the most unhandy among us (such as myself). Buy it, try a couple of projects in your backyard, and in a few years be sure to send Brad and me a thank you note!”

- Kevin Dahl, Executive Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH and author of Wild Foods of the Sonoran Desert and Native Harvest: Gardening with Authentic Southwestern Crops

Book awards

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1 awarded Best Gardening/Agriculture Book and Best First Book in the 2007 Arizona/Glyph Book Awards. http://azbookpub.com/onews/2007-arizona-book-award-winners/

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1 has been awarded the Silver Medal in the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards Home and Garden category. http://www.independentpublisher.com/article/php?page=1157

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1 selected as a pick for the 2006 Southwest Book of the Year by the Pima County Public Library. http://www.tppl.org/books/swboy/2006/gilbert.php

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1 has been selected as a finalist in Foreword Magazine’s 2006 Book of the Year Awards. http://www.forewordmagazine.com/botya/search2k6.aspx?srchtype=category&srchval=26

Book specifications:

• ISBN 978-0-9772464-0-3
• LCCN 2005907763
• Published by Rainsource Press
• Distributed in North America by Chelsea Green Publishing Company 1-800-639-4099
• Distributed in Australia by Tower Books 02-9975-5599
• $24.95
• Paperback
• 8.5″ X 11″
• 200 pages
• Over 150 illustrations; index; bibliography; six appendices including patterns of water flow and erosion, water harvesting traditions, calculations, plant lists, worksheets, and resource lists.
• Foreward by Gary Paul Nabhan
• Printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper
• Categories: water harvesting, landscape design, ecology, sustainable strategies
• Release date: November 2005
• Official month of publication: January 2006