Green Landscaping and Gardening - Collecting Rain Water

I live in mid-west Texas and in the country. I want to have a vegetable garden this coming spring. We are on a water co-op so our water bill is already farely high without watering anything outside. I've been researching about collecting rain water. We're still working on our new house and the first thing is going to be getting gutters up. But my roof has ALOT of runoff when it does rain. The blue 50g barrells aren't going to be big enough to collect all that rain unless I have about 25 of them. I've looked at some of the metal containers that are larger, but they're just too darn expensive. Has anyone used some other type of container that holds 1,000g or more. I would like to find something recyclable to use. Any bright ideas?

BTW, if anyone else does want to use the blue barrels, try contacting a Pepsi/Dr Pepper or Coke plant near you. The ones in Abilene, Texas sell them for under $10.

Wende

Upended galvanized culverts are often used as cisterns to harvest rain water. http://www.zonagardens.com/landscape/rainwater.asp

You might use a big wooden barrel for collecting rainwater, however, you might be able to outlay it with some plastic foil so that no water leaks out.

Barrels and trash cans are not enough to accommodate lots of run off and storage for garden and other purposes. My grandparents and some neighbors when I was a child had inground, concrete cisterns. Big, concrete boxes collect the run off. Those can be quite expensive to build.
We had a rain barrel as a child. It was just a big metal barrel at one end of the house. When there was no rain, both the rain barrel and the well went dry. Usually, by the time the rain barrel went dry, it rained within a week or so.
This has been an extremely dry summer in the high mountains of WV. My spring, which has been dry for the past two years, has forced us to use jug water and to have water hauled in. If we had had rain barrels, there would have been no rain.
If connected to a city source of water and desiring to economize for the purpose of watering a garden, then a rain barrel or cistern can alleviate some of the costs of city water. Some internet research on how to build a cistern may be beneficial.