pleasures of hand-watering

It’s not a proper gray­wa­ter sys­tem, but we’ve got­ten used to show­er­ing with a bucket below us, both to catch the water before it gets warm enough to use and to catch what­ever water splashes into the bucket. We still lose usable water down the drain, but we’re putting what we save to good use in the garden.

hand-watering-a-buckwheat

With only a small part of the yard on auto­matic water­ing, I’ve always done a lot of water­ing by hand. Now I’ve been doing it a lot more using reclaimed water.

Most of it’s been spot-watering. Not every­thing in the gar­den needs the same amount of water, so why not water only the things that need water? This is a tiny buck­wheat seedling I’ve been encour­ag­ing to get established.

It’s a great way to get to know your plants bet­ter. At the same time you learn a lot about the soil they’re grow­ing in, with some areas of the yard accept­ing a lot of water, while oth­ers just pool up and drain slowly.

graybeard

Another water-conserving thing I’ve been doing is to let the facial fuzz go a few more days than I used to–Good thing facial hair is in these days. More fuzz = less water needed to take it off. (Don’t let the color of the hair get you off-subject. Remem­ber that I’m talk­ing about graywater, not gray hair…)

But back to gray­wa­ter: One con­cern I have with using water from the shower is what hap­pens when bath prod­ucts get dumped in the gar­den. I’m work­ing on find­ing out more, but in the mean­time I’m only water­ing the orna­men­tals with the gray­wa­ter. A local blog Linda turned me on to, Angel with Dirty Fin­ger Nails, did an intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject. The post made some rec­om­men­da­tions for laun­dry deter­gents and linked to a list of a few things to avoid.

Sure, water­ing by hand is more labor-intensive than turn­ing on the sprin­klers. But I think I’ve men­tioned it before that I count myself among the gar­den­ers who enjoy gar­den­ing, not just gar­dens. Water­ing by hand is one of those great plea­sures that only gar­den­ers like us will understand.

June 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • | 9 Comments »