Having never owned a house or really had a yard of my own, I got pretty excited and decided to do some ad-hoc landscaping. Built some raised beds for vegetables, and just laying in some organic shaped in-ground beds for low water decorative plants. Gonna fill the rest in with gravel. Any pointers?
Looks great! You could add a rain barrel to easily water your plants for free. Just avoid watering vegetables with runoff from your roof.
Good advice. Will a barrel help to settle out the micro plastics and bad stuff?
The most common setups I've seen use "first flush diverters" to let the first bit of rainwater run off before collecting the rest, which will handle a large chunk of the impurities. The nastiest stuff tends to come with the initial volume.
You could further filter/distill but I don't think that's as common.
Sorry, I don't understand your question.
Just as an addendum, make sure you're careful about rain barrel sizing. Colorado imposes limits on how much you're allowed to collect.