In the last few years many of us have had to deal with drought, often drastic or prolonged, and I think many of you share my suspicion that a shortage of water is a problem that's not going to go away soon. Here in my corner of Italy the last two winters have hardly been winter at all, not chilly, not wet: a far cry from the stories my neighbor (younger than I) tells me of the winter of 1985, when a driver didn't have to worry sliding off the icy, curving hill roads because snow was banked so high on the sides that escape was impossible. I remember myself in 2000 traveling from the Po Plain to Innsbruck in December and finding myself warmer in Innsbruck. Of course weather runs in cycles, and I don't doubt that we'll have sopping, muddy, freezing, miserable winters again; still, the trend appears to be towards warmer and drier weather, and I want to be able to live and to garden with it.
Our property's water needs for both house and garden are met by the local network of treated water. We don't have a well. The local water network is limited; in the summer of 2003, a great drought year in many parts of Europe, it ran dry entirely, and water had to be brought up by truck. I dislike using treated water for the garden anyway; it strikes me as wasteful; but we need some water if we're going to garden at all, for potted plants, rooting cuttings, and plants that have been planted within the last year. We water all these by hand and about as sparingly as we can while keeping them alive.
The garden is becoming more and more a dry garden: I mean, one that doesn't get any water except that for the plants in the first year. We work at water conservation by mulching our plants heavily, and by planting (at least trying to) in the fall, not the spring, to give the plants more time to get established before the summer heat and drought hit. We're aided by our clay, water retentive soil. I render up thanks for every summer thunderstorm, for every unseasonal rainfall. At the moment it's raining, finally and at last, after a dry winter and early spring (roughly four inches in four months); in the last two weeks we've gotten, what? two inches perhaps, and the forecast says more to come. The plants love it. Everything is green, green, green; and the plants, the ground, the aquifers will be marvelously fortified in preparation for the coming of summer.
When it gets dry we become stingy and inventive with water in the house, too. I've profited by hints from forum members: a bucket in the bathroom for bath and shower water to flush the toilet; a basin in the utility sink for laundry water to dump on the plants; another bucket in the kitchen sink and more water for the plants. When it get really hot, I take outdoor showers with a standup shower hooked up to a garden hose: it's a shocking experience, but vivid. Last year I gave up my vegetable garden and dahlias: too needy of water (some dahlia tubers that got left behind volunteered anyway, and made themselves beautiful without irrigation). It goes without saying (doesn't it?) that grass doesn't get any water. It's brown and dead in the summer, but then it comes back. I'm really surprised that this year we actually have something that looks like a lawn: we never worked at it. And of course, forget washing cars.
So how did the garden do last year, with one lifesaving rain in June, no rain in July and weeks of 100F temps, one rain in August, hardly any rain in September: it didn't rain strongly until the end of October, too late for a fall flowering of the Teas. My cuttings in pots got massacred: my husband watered, but it was too hot, too dry, too windy. The garden did reasonably well: most plants, new and established, survived, though they weren't particularly happy about the situation. I had some cane dieback and cankers, and am waiting to see how the disease situation will develop this year; the roses looked beaten up by the end of the season; the fall flowering was an outrage. It was an unsatisfactory year, except that most things lived. Now it's a new year. The garden looks SPLENDID; the roses are healthy and covered in buds. I'm looking forward, I hope we will have, marvelous spring roses. It remains to be seen, but the situation is very promising.
Anyway, how much water did we use? We got our quarterly water bill this month. Estrapolating from a nine month period that included last summer, our annual water consumption was 297 cubic meters, or 81,675 gallons. According to the water utility's statistics this is 8.4% over the average consumption for a family of three in the Province of Piacenza. Our garden last year had about three hundred roses, as well as box, yew, clematis, lilies, four o'clocks, bay laurel, privet, lavender, lilacs, palms, and so on.
This is my account of my experience with water, how we use it, what happens as a result, how much we consume. As always, I'd like to hear what you think.
Melissa
donnaz5
ingrid_vc so. CA zone 9
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