The Watering Hole

This room is for conversations about water conservation and simple ways that we save water. Conserving water is getting to be so important today.  Even if we live somewhere that we have plenty of water, we should not waste it and we never know when a problem can occur that would cause us a short supply or no supply of water.  Just in our city alone, we have water disruptions at times.  We all need water, our plants need water when we have no rain. So it is a balancing act to figure out ways to save water from one area to use in another area. 

Charles and I have been working on reducing our water use for many years and we continue to do so. We actually have laws in our state that do not allow us to use grey water to water our trees and plants. This is very frustrating. To be able to use our greywater we would have to have special filtering in place and we are trying to find out exactly what that is. For now we try our best and reduce our indoor water use so we can use the drinking water for the plants. We save the cold water that is coming out of the faucet while we are waiting for warm water. Dishwater can be used to flush the toilet and so can bath water. 

We have a small garden shed which we rigged up to catch the rain during the winter via a gutter to fill four water barrels which are connected to each other; when one barrel is full, the water then goes via a tube into the next barrel.  This is the only water for our vegetable garden.  It cost quite a bit to buy the barrels & the connections but it was vital for us to do because our garden is not next to our house or any other supply of water.  Last summer (we're in England), we had a drought and it was this set-up which meant we were still able to water our vegetable plants.  (I think that you may use different words for gutters or water barrels in America or Australia but I don't know what they are!)