Getting All Wet

Now this might sound like another kind of fun, but I am talking about gardening here…fun in its own right and a little less kinky.

Part of building a potager for us was thinking about organic practices and sustainability. It makes little sense to grow your own vegetables then use precious (and expensive) city water and chemical fertilizers and pest control products. The idea of home grown should be organic, sustainable, cost effective and good for you!

I will talk about fertilizer and pest control in a later entry. Today, I want to talk about our efforts to conserve water.

Living in an urban environment has a lot of advantages, including city water and facility service. However, this convenient source of safe and high quality water comes at a cost. Water bills typically run around $100 for a three month period, some areas are even higher. With increased usage, come increased costs (lawn and garden watering drives up usage by at least 50% during the spring, summer and fall months). Our small garden covers around 200 square feet total including garden beds, perennial borders and containers, in years past, this has increased our water bill by as much as $50 for the three month period.

Adding a vegetable garden would significantly increase the water usage of our household. To minimize the impact of that increase, we decided to divert our garage downspouts to a rain barrel. This is a specially designed rain barrel available from http://www.gardeners.com/ that has a spigot at the bottom and hose that allows you to connect it to another hose or a drip line or to fill watering cans.

In the few days following installation, we went through a rainy period in Columbus and our rain barrel was on its way to filling nicely. I plan on using that water to plant the garden with the spring root crops this week! Free water!!! It is a great idea and not too difficult or expensive (the cost of the rain barrel is off set by two or three billing periods of our water bill). We enjoy the benefits of the rain barrel so much, we are planning to place another one in the back yard to collect the water from the backside of our house. If we displace the water used in the back yard, we will see very little increase in our water bill this spring and summer as we follow strict watering guidelines for our front yard and garden bed.

Sitting in my breakfast room now, looking at the rain, makes me wish we had already purchased and installed that second barrel!
Happy Gardening!