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Welcome to Plum Landing.
Today, we're on a mission for Plum.
These are looking pretty with all the yellow flowers.
We are collecting data about how our garden grows.
My name is Kiana, and that's my sister Kaya
and my sister Kalea.
And that's my mom and my dad.
We decided to have a vegetable garden
because it's cool to grow your own food.
Tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli.
I'm drawing pictures for Plum.
I think Plum would be interested
in our vegetable garden.
We planted this garden at the end of May.
Now it's the end of July,
and our vegetables are doing pretty good.
The water's coming from the rain
because we're trying to conserve water.
Our town has asked us not to water our lawns and gardens
with the hose this summer
so that we can conserve water for drinking.
So all the water for our garden needs to come from the rain.
A vegetable garden needs about one inch of rainwater per week.
We've been checking our garden every week.
It's more than one inch, guys.
That's good.
We're using a rain gauge to catch the rain
and tell us how much rain that we're getting each week.
This is a way of collecting data.
This is our chart representing the days when it rained.
We drew raindrops on each day that it rained.
We checked our rain gauge
and recorded the total rainfall for each week.
And since May,
we've been getting one inch or more per week.
It's been just enough rain that our vegetables
are growing beautifully.
Now it's the middle of August
and we're going to check out our vegetable garden again.
Right now, the garden looks very dry.
Some of the leaves are turning brown.
Wow.
There's way less than one inch.
We might be having a drought because we're not getting
enough rain for our vegetable garden.
I'm taking pictures for Plum.
The plants look kind of sagging and dry.
They don't look very happy.
So we decided to make a rain barrel.
The rain barrel is a trash can, pretty much.
Can you hold it from the handles here
because you've got the lid.
We're setting up a rain barrel.
That way we can capture the rain that falls on the roof
and use it to water our garden whenever it needs water,
not just when it's raining outside.
Yes!
We did it.
Because the rainwater's going to go onto the roof.
And then it will go down the gutter
and into the rain barrel.
Before when it rained, the vegetable garden
only got the rain that fell on the vegetable garden.
Now when it rains, the vegetable garden
will be getting all the water that falls onto the roof
and falls into our rain barrel.
All the water it'll collect on the roof
from all over the whole house,
it'll all come down the downspout
and it'll go right into the hole that mom cut.
Now that we have our rain barrel,
we'll be able to water our garden
without using the water from the hose.
Now it's the end of August,
and awhile ago we made a rain barrel.
We're not using anything from the hose
or the town's reservoir.
Now, because we have our rain barrel,
we can get water from previous times it's rained
and save it up so that times when we need it,
like when we had that drought,
we'll be able to use water from our rain barrel.