diagrams of swales and such, that i hope help peple understand waterharvesing.

Ornamentals are part of permaculture on the principle that you dont quiet know how things efect each other and so variety is good.
  IN india they let the first rains of the monsoon go and catch the second ones.
  Around  the great lakes area they have water gardens have to look that up again in case its rain gardens an area that you fill with organic matter i think it is and then plant hardy local weeds in and you run water that might be contaminated with petrol from your car through that the soil and the plants and the bacteria should filter out the petrol and such.
  They have these gardens down by the lakes because all run off from roads and back yards goes into the drains and into the lakes so contaminating them, I heard about it in a peice they did on CNN on the Chcago alley clean up project. If things were as nature intended the rain water would run through the soil full of roots and living organisms before it went to into rivers and got carried to laakes only we change everythign and water goes to the sea unfiltered.
    In the chicago alley clean up project they also got paving that let the water through the paving and seeded the subsoil wiht bacteria of the positive sort to eat up petrol and any pathogens that might be around from the the run of of dustbins left out in the back alleys. I htink tha tif you have petrol around n a natural situation not too much of it you h¡can hope petrol eating bacteriawill get to that place.
  They also put in white and reflective paths so they reflected the light and did not heat up.

  Looking up sand filters in you tube is interesting. A sand filter is a  barrel full of sand and the top layer filters because if should get ful of bacteria and such feeding of any bits of leaves and such that fall in wiht the water and that layer full of life  makes a bio filter. Then the sand filters the elctromagnetic attractiion between bits of sand catches things and the pure darkness and airlessness and kills things like pathogens off. It all adds to your undertanding or taking in the message about rain gardens. The Chicago alley clean up has a lot of permaculture type thing in it, it is worth looking up. agri rose macaskie.

I will research rain gardens some more. Our local county extension office has a rain garden demonstration so they should be able to tell me the benefits.

Thank you for your help rose!

I have lots more to say, i always bubble over with these themes, i  have been looking things up on you tube again.  
   arashinage's video bio sand filter says that you use 70 mesh silica sand for a sand filter. this is a barrel full of sand with a bit of gravel at the bottom.
The pipe the water comes out of, leaves from the bottom of the barrel and then bends upwards to just below the level of the top of the sand and then turns out and has a tap on the end. So you will only get the water from the  level  of hte top of the sand coming out of the tap.

   The bio layer at the top is called schutzdecke in some videos, in plain english smutty deck layer, i suspect or more scientifically, the biological layer.
 the top layer of sand catches bacteria and bits of organic matter that live and breed in the first two centimetres and form the biolayer.
 HideouseMonsterHank says that you need to have dirty water in the filter for about two or three weeks to get you bio filter top layer, and that you need to keep the whole wet he thinks. commenting on a videoand asks to be advised  if he is wrong.
   One thing that is fun about the computer is that people with unserious names make very seriouse commments.
  Another good video to whatch is HOw a sand filter works animation style.
   The bit below the bio filter is said to filter the water through mecanical means, these being that particles get held up in the sand for one and for another that the bits of sand have static eletricity that stick particles to the sand, and thirdly  that the dark and lack of food kills pahtogens held up in the sand.
  It seems they are installing these biosand filters all over India and Pakistan, there are lots of indian and pakistnai videos on it . Some comments on one videos said  "it woudn't work" and one woman replied it would be much better than no filter. However scientist have studied it and it is vouched for at least it kills nintey five percent of pathogens and all parasites. It maynot be so absolutely sure as chlorine but it seem it is pretty sure.  There are videos of sand filters in  two litre bottles, type, big coke bottles about a third full of sand, they did mention how much sand you have to have. Zenrainman who is great on all these themes has a video of this is biosand filter-using 2 litre pot bottle. agri rose macaskie

A great video on water harvesting, full of pictures of bunds, big farm ponds that harvest rain water is called watershed panoramas - Koppal district  these go from ponds about a feild big, to what looks nearly like lakes. there is another video nearly the same called farm bund in koppal but i think the first takes the ponds from angles that makes it easier to see their shape.
  In a lot of the ponds of these videos it seems that the earth taken out of the ground to dig the pond is piled up to make a bank round the pond.
    I don't know how they are sealed, but i am going to ask. agri rose macaskie.

  burra malucas diagram of swales on contour is great. agri rose macaskie.

  Finch you asked about filtering the water from roofs in a video of warter harvestign in india of xenrain mans a man has the water pass through a box that contains i htink it was 6 inches of charcoal and below that six inches of rough sand.
  also he has the pipe that comes from the roof get nearly to the ground cappped and when that lenght fills full of water the rain starts to go down a pipe that comes out of this one of this one from high up and goes into the filter. So the first water of the rains goes into a dead end and it is only after the first so many liters run into this dead end that the water starts to run into the pope that lead to the filter.  You just take the cap off that dead end after the rains to empty the water caught in it onto the ground. Ingeneous eh. I will do a drawing of it. agri rose macaskie.

finch.  more on filtering the run off water-
  I have been whatching videos, you tube ones, on recharge bore wells. In india they are filling up the wells in the rainy season to recharge ground water for their wells that have run dry. 
 
  They use a silt trap for the run off water they are going to direct to a recharge well.
    That is a pond or pit that wil catch the waer and hold it for long enough for the particles of dirt to sink to the bottom of the pond and then you can take of the water from above the mud at the bottom which should be free of silt.

  finch you were asking about putting charcoal in, to filter the water and in one video of making a recharge well they put charcoal among other things in as part of their filtration media.
    At a certain depth, which would allow room for all the filtration media at the top of the well, they put a perforated cap  into the well , on which they put filtration media .
  on top of the cap in th ewell they put.

  5 cm    40mm crushed stone,
  5cm      activeted carbon and charcoal.
  10 cm  of 20 mm crushed stone
  10 cm of gravel sand.
They say that this will filter the water they were sending in to the well to refill the ground water levels.

  I have read that if  you have heavy metals in the water you have to use reverse osmosis or evaporate the water off in to another container leaving the heavy metals behind but i think that the amount of heavy metals running of a road that services a few houses should not be full enough of heavy metals to worry about.
    One video of recharge wells has them alongside a ditch by a road. there are  silt traps in the ditch and a pipe to carry the water from the ditch into the recharge wells.  zenrainman says says that if there is a heavy petrol spill on the road you can just cap the pipe that takes the water out of the drain into the recharge well and so the water will not enter it it will it will just flow down the drain to wherever the city has made provision for it. Not too good if the provision is in your garden. agri rose macaskie.
 
   
 

      Brad Lancaster permaculturist of Tucson Arizona  has some explanation of rain gardens in his rain water harvesting basics 1,2 and 3, videos on you tube.
    He gives classes on permaculture in conjunction with the university down down there.

    Also i was looking up catails clean detergernts cattails could easily be part of a rain garden maybe not as it woudl dry out when it was not raining. I was looking up cattaqils clean detergent from water as zenrainman uses cattails to clean up his grey water from the washing machine in his Bangalore-how to use roofs smartly and ecologicaly you tube video  and the article i found, i had better look it up again and put in its name, said that cattails break down the detergents, the detergent molecules get broken down so you end up with carbon, hydrogen and phosporus, atoms that the cattails can eat and that the microbes in the water at the feet of the bog plants also break down detergent molecules. Cattails also take up arsenic so they can clean that from water too but you then have to think of where to dispose of the arsenic filled plants. So that is one way in which rain gardens work. agri rose macaskie.

I've been busy working the last few days, but have been given a short break before working New Years.

We are figuring up our budget for next year and are going to be installing 2 (more than likely) sand filters for our house. Thank you so much for doing this research for us, much appreciated. Our roof area is huge and its a shame that we aren't using it.

Things are a changing

I do enjoy researching things, i found after years of hoping things would get better, that machism meant that i was quietly shut out of all seriouse conversastion even that traditional thinking meant that others simply decided that any interest in how things worked was just a way of showing off rather than real. I consider that a whole person is interested in the seriouse and the frivolouse and children and in how things work if they aren't interested in all thses things and more some part of their human nature has been starved. Pepole say be yourself are we not a complex of many potential actions and so what is outrselves. As I was a woman and a woman who once tried a lot in marriage seemed to have accepted a very traditional role in marriage and liked doing things with children pepole just decided taht i did not also like weighin gup the things that effect us all. Women here in spain who want to be taken seriously, some of them at anyrate, are carefull not to do things like sowing for instance. I do enjoy things of this sort a lot and was starved them for decades. agri rose macaskie.

  The best video i know on water harvesting from your roof is zenrainmans harvesting rain an urban rainwater system. a you tube video.
  Maybe india is good on rainwater harvesting because in much of India they have the monsoon when so very much rain falls and then a drought the rest of the year. This having a big surplus in one season makes collecting water obviously advantageous.

  The habit of collecting water has lead to water being collected even in the parts of India that are deserts and pretty extreme ones like the Thar desert it has been well worth it even in such dry spots, as brad lancaster says an inch of rain on an acre of land is 27,000 galleons of water.

    The video of the urban rainwater system says they get ninety seven thousand liters of water a year from the roof of the man with the rain water collection system.
     In india they swear by underground tanks to collect the rain water in they have underground tanks traditionally and they say that as they aren't exposed to heat and cold they don't crack so easily as above ground ones and also dont get knocked around, also that people have to pump the watrer out instead of just opening a tap and this makes those who use the water more carefull of it, they can't leave the tap running.
    The underground tanks  used to be painted with white wash which disinfects the objects it whitens. Concrete attracts a black mold that makes it look dirty.

     The tank of the man in the video is tank is 6,500 meters big, and he catches 97,000 liters of water a year.
    His roof is a hundred meters in area and in Bangalore you get 970 milimeters of rainfall a year. He says that the water he collects is enough his family.
   He says that without rainwater harvesting from the roofs of the inhabitants  the city will be in big ttrouble supplying its inhabitants with water, with it they will be fine.
  The video is well worth whatching, it is inspiring, a description of it is very antiseptic and cold, you lose the passion of the rain water harvesters and the speed with which he rattles off numbers, i hate numbers. agri rose maccaskie.