by Leslie Cox; Sunday; August 20, 2017

Summers in the garden are getting pretty brutal here in what is typically a rainforest area of the Pacific Northwest. We are into our third year of summer drought with little to no rainfall and higher than normal temperatures. Longest stretch of days with no rain this summer is 55…from June 18th to August 12th. When the blessed event finally arrived, it dropped less than 10 mm…less than half an inch of rain. Hardly even a sneeze across the landscape. Since then, we have only have a trace of rain…just enough to make the driveway blacktop a little darker and scatter a few drops on plant leaves.

Trying to keep our gardens hydrated in such harsh conditions is becoming difficult. Especially since water conservation should be on everyone’s radar. I know…Canada seemingly has an abundant supply of freshwater, holding potentially as much as one fifth of the global supply within its borders. But this is a fallacy because only about seven percent of our water in Canada qualifies as a renewable source and meets the quality standard for human consumption.

There is much political discussion on how our water within Canada’s borders should be marketed or distributed on the global market…whether it is ours exclusively or if it should be freely distributed to those without water. I will not get into this debate here. What concerns me, principally, is doing my very best to conserve the water resources available to us, here in our garden in Black Creek.

Just so the cards are on the table…we are on a water meter here (have been for over 30 years now) and must pay for what we use on a quarterly basis, as well as pay a lump sum which is tacked onto our annual house taxes. Naturally, having to fork out of our wallet for the water we use does make us very conscious of our consumption level. And in the summer months, with the garden in full swing, we do use more water than we normally do through the winter.

Solution: set up a water reclamation system.

Now, we have not gone so far as to put in a grey water reclamation system or a huge rain water reclamation tank. Both of these are either a little outside of our financial resources or are too large for what available space we have.

What we have installed are five 45 gallon (170 L) barrels. Two are set up to catch all of the rain water off the front half of the roof on the house. One is set up to catch the rain off of the back half of the roof. (We used to have two barrels in this position but one sprang a leak and has yet to be replaced.) The last two barrels catch all of the rain water off the garage roof with an overflow which, when opened, empties into the fish pond during torrential downpours.

This system is awesome as we can fill one whole barrel connected to the front half of the house in just ten minutes of a really good rain. However, once the barrels are full, we have no other storage system for holding additional rain water and must set up the overflows to drain into the cedar hedge and fish pond.

Needless to say, this reclamation system only works well during rainfall periods. Given we have had less than 10 mm of rain since June 18th, the barrels are pretty dry. We have had to resort to hand watering the garden…which takes a fair length of time for a garden of this size.

But we do utilize other methods of water conservation. One is re-using all of our dish washing water…something we can easily do since we do not have an automatic dishwasher and must hand-wash. Placing a wash tub in the sink makes it very easy to wash the dishes and then carry the finished wash water outside to distribute around the garden beds.

Another water conservation innovation is to create a mini bog garden for those plants which prefer frequent watering. This is easily done by digging a hole, lining it with plastic, and re-filling the hole with a 50/50 mix of garden soil and compost…or garden soil and well-aged manure. Full, step-by-step directions on how to make a mini bog garden can be found in the How To section under the In the Garden heading on the menu bar. (Quick link here.)

 

Of course, there are still other ways of conserving water usage in the garden but they wait for another blog entry down the road.