Green Wizardries, Dune-Style Water Conservation by Maxine Rogers
We had to water the garden in April. And not just my household. April was painfully dry. This made for good weather to get out and prepare the garden beds but soil in the garden in April should never be this powder dry. The whole Province is involved in a serious drought and also Alberta. Being this close to the coast, we should get more rain than other, less favoured, parts of the Province but it might well amount to a lot less than we are used to. In fact, once you find yourself watering in April, I would say it is all over but the screaming.
When we moved here, years ago, I wanted to have the waste water piped out of the house to a tank so we could use it for irrigation. Our plumber friend thought it was a bad idea, a difficult and expensive project, and we gave up on the plan. There was too much technology for my taste. It would have required pumps and a filtration system and it would have been too expensive.
This year, I have been harvesting all the waste water from our house to use on the flower beds and I use the dishwater on the compost bins. A lot of people do not seem to realize how much water compost needs to break down all the carbon and nitrogen into a beautiful, rich, crumbly, soil amendment.
In the past, I have tried using dishwater to irrigate ornamental trees but they did not thrive on the greasy, detergent laden water. I find it is okay to use this water to activate the compost piles. Compost is a living, breathing colony of many life forms and they all need water to live, eat and digest the compost.
If you took the time now to fork over your compost, I bet you would find it is pretty dry. A compost pile exhales moisture as it digests. A large, well made compost pile should have steam coming off it day and night and that means it needs lots of water to replace the what it loses to evaporation.
A few years ago, I also tried using real soap, instead of detergent, to wash dishes and laundry. Modern septic systems do not respond well to this and I was forever borrowing a friend’s drain snake to break up the chunks of reconstituted soap in the pipes. Soap, made from fat is a lot more easily composted and biodegraded than detergent. People used to use a cake of soap to wash dishes and grated soap flakes to wash their laundry. In those days, there were pits dug outside of houses for the sink’s water to empty into as the soap has a way of determinedly blocking pipes.
I found a very simple way to overcome the problems of expense and technology to save my waste water. I put plastic tubs in the sinks and have a bucket beside the sink to receive the used water. People claim that hand-washing dishes takes 14 litres per batch but these people must be water hogs from the city as I find even a large load of dishes only takes me about 6 litres to wash and rinse. That water goes onto the compost piles. The water from the bathroom sinks contains only soap and water so I use that to water my flower beds. The flowers do not seem to mind.
It is May now and I hope everyone had a satisfying Beltane. I have confined our cat to a spacious, enclosed entry porch where he has his own armchair. He is not keen on this but is being philosophical. The cat, Festus, is a great mouse, ratter and voler.
Since we got him, we have had no trouble from the rodents that were chewing holes in the pex water lines under our house. Our poor plumber friend was getting discouraged as he had to crawl under the house a couple of times a month and repair our lines. We were losing a lot of water in the process and his well-earned wages were an extra expense for us and a trial for him to earn. It was a lose, lose situation.
So, my husband, after a determined two-year campaign to get a cat, had his way and we got Festus. I don’t like cats because they kill birds and they have the disgusting habit of playing with and tormenting their pray before killing it. Almost human really… Festus solved my dislike of cats by casting a glamour over me to make me his willing slave.
So, Festus is in the lock up for May and for as much of June as I can manage. My husband hates it when the cat is upset but May and June are a critical time for nesting birds and their fledgling youngsters. If we all kept our cats in for as much of May and June as we can manage, just think of the glorious result of so many songbirds saved from a needless death.
