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| My street, with a corner of the garden |
My street got a
long-awaited repaving last week. In three days, town crews efficiently took off
the top two inches of asphalt and laid down a like amount of new blacktop along
a three-mile course. I was impressed
with both the speed and attention to environmental conservation, with the old
macadam bring instantly whisked away for reprocessing.
Like many of my
neighbors, I came out to watch as the paving crew went by. As they worked in front of my house, Highway
Department Foreman Bobby Kennedy paused to look over our still-abuilding
landscape.
“Neal,” he
said. “I don’t think I want to know how
you’re keeping all those plants so green.”
Medfield, like
virtually every town in eastern Massachusetts, is under tight water
restrictions this year. Even including
that mountain of snow that fell between January and March, the region has had
less than 25 inches of precipitation so far this year against an average of
nearly 33 in the first nine months. It
just didn’t rain this summer. We are in
a drought.
We thought we
had our watering needs taken care of when we installed four 55-gallon rain
barrels across the back of our house. As
little as a quarter of an inch of rainfall will fill those four barrels to
overflowing. The trick to a rain barrel,
however, is to first get the rain
and, second, to get the rain to fall evenly over time. As the chart nearby shows so starkly, September
produced less than half the normal amount of rainfall and it all fell in a six
day period in the middle of the month.
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| Too little rain, and not spread out sufficiently to make rain barrels a useful tool for conservation |
And so, to keep
our new plants alive and growing while adhering to both the letter and spirit
of water bans, we have resorted to an eyedropper approach to watering. Or, to be more accurate, we employ a flotilla
of cat litter containers.
Here’s a
statistic: if you have a 3,000
square-foot lawn – that’s 100 feet by 30 feet – and you turn on your sprinkler
system long enough to put a half an inch of water on that lawn, you will use a
thousand gallons of water.
We don’t have a
lawn and, if we did, we wouldn’t water it.
Lawns go dormant in the heat of summer and recover nicely when cooler
weather returns. But we have eight newly
planted trees, roughly 60 shrubs, and nearly 200 perennials, all in the ground
three months or less. If the roots of
those trees and plants don’t have access to water, they die.
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| Our secret weapon: an armada of cat litter containers, shown next to our empty rain barrels |
We also have a
massive number of three-gallon containers that originally held cat litter. Today, they have been re-purposed to hold
water. Our original plan was to use the
containers as ‘overflow’ for all the water being produced by our rain barrels;
the equivalent of a fifth or sixth barrel.
But in the absence of rainfall, the water in those containers comes out
of a faucet.
When we water,
each tree gets two containers, or six gallons, of water. Each shrub gets between one and 1.5 gallons
of water. Depending on size, each
perennials gets from a quart and half a gallon of water. The water is applied directly to the base of
the plant where we wisely created a mulch berm around everything we planted.
So, how much
water do we use? I started counting the
number of times I re-filled those containers.
Amazingly, we are watering our entire garden using less than 180
gallons.
There’s just one
minor downside to this otherwise ingenious, water-efficient method of keeping our
plants properly hydrated… someone has to carry that water from plant to plant
and fill those jugs.
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| Every tree, shrub, and perennial we've planted incorporates a mulch ring to hold water |
Betty and I
share that activity, which we typically perform just after dawn on those days
we water. I fill twenty or so jugs and
then pre-position them where experience says they will do the most good. Betty does the actual watering and leaves the
empty containers where I can collect them.
I re-fill the jugs and return them to where I think they’ll be
needed. All this is done at breakneck
speed with jugs being placed and collected up to 150 feet from where I fill
them. A physician would say I’m getting
a good upper cardio workout. The
neighbors have concluded we’re nuts.
You may ask
yourself, ‘why not just use a hose?’
That’s a good question; a sign of a nimble mind at work.
The answer is
twofold: first, we can water with containers in a fraction of the time it takes
to do so with a hose. Our watering
record is 20 minutes. I can fill a
three-gallon container in ten seconds.
Try pushing that much water through a hose without blasting the soil off
the roots of a plant in the process. Also,
hose watering is, at minimum, a two-person process. One person points the hose. The others performs a continuous mambo to
keep the trailing part of the hose – and we’re talking a hundred feet of hose
here – from crushing or being dragged over unsuspecting plants. I might also add that dragged hoses have a
way of ‘reconfiguring’ bark mulch beds and gravel paths, and disassembling
stone walls.
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| Garden hoses have a tendency to disassemble rock walls |
The second
answer is that there is no waste with containers: every drop gets on the plants
that need it. Moreover, those containers are continually being filled not only
with water drawn specifically for watering, but for other household activities
as well. We collect the water other
people let flow down their drains – shower water awaiting that perfect
temperature, for example, or water used to wash vegetables. Trust me, the plants don’t mind.
The downside is
the abandonment of any attempt at dignity. At 6:30 a.m., our neighbors can look
out their windows and see the Sanders flying around the garden carrying those
dumb containers. I cannot help but
notice that we are now getting a contingent of dog walkers who have adjusted
their schedules to better enjoy the spectacle.
I know we’re good for a laugh.
