Blue sage after rain
That is the thought that crossed my mind yesterday. It's been so long since it last rained, it seemed amazing. Everything that needs water has been shriveling up around us and we have spent a lot of time every day trying to keep things from dying of thirst.
Both my hyper-awareness regarding the lack of water and my growing appreciation of it is due to more than just our recent drought. For one thing, we've been trying to use only "gray water" to water the plants in our small front yard garden. So we divert into buckets the kitchen water that would normally run down the drain while we wait for it to get hot. We bought a lovely, fully-outfitted rain barrel from Indigo and set it outside to hold the gray water and also collect rain water (it has a screen top to keep out leaves and egg-laying mosquitoes). But the weather's been so dry and our plants so thirsty, that lately we've just been pouring the buckets from the tap right on the plants.
rain barrel - thank you Indigo!
For another thing, the water at our big empty-lot garden was recently virtually turned off, barely trickling. The new fall plantings are struggling because even standing over each of them for five minutes with the hose is not enough in this dry heat with so little water pressure. I called the owner to ask him if there is anyway we can get the water turned back on. Haven't heard back yet.
If it doesn't start flowing again soon, we're going to either abandon ship or come up with something more creative. What in the world did the early Floridians do before irrigation? Carry water I suppose for the little plants and pray for rain. They also planted things further apart (no more square foot gardening) and were more intentional about planting times and varieties suited to the particular climate. I'm reading this book on "growing food in hard times" to get some ideas. We could also try container gardening on our front steps (or better in the huge empty parking lot next door) closer to our house-water supply and maybe try diverting more gray water toward garden use by exploring ways to catch the water from the washer and bathroom sinks . . . But there is a point where our little efforts seem to amount to so very little - especially when I regularly walk by business sprinkler systems watering sidewalks and gutters. I don't even want to think of the huge amounts of water used to green up the Gator football field.
I am rambling, but this is how my thoughts go when I really start to think about how much water we use, how much others use, and how things may be in the future. This kind of thing...
I'd like to learn how regions that already have water issues make creative use of their resources - both at home and at the industrial level. Meanwhile I would be amazed and grateful if water would fall from the sky again.
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