First phone, then cable TV, sat TV and finally Internet brought the world together. Not really...

Just think about the days before phones came. Before there was a refrigerator.

Each village, town and city in the world had a unique character and charm. A new comer had to physically meet the local people in daily life. They needed milk and newspaper to be delivered. Cook breakfast, carry lunch and come home in the evening for early dinner and socialize with the locals. Be a Roman in Rome really applied. People kept in touch with letters.

Then came the phone and refrigerator. Both kept people at home and talk to people far away. Phone took away the need for letters which people treasured and read and re-read. People did not care to know their neighbors anymore. Just used the phone to talk to people far away.

Then came cable TV. Obesity began and diseases like heart attack, diabetes exploded due to inactivity and eating bad food. Then came international TV on cable. The people who came to a foreign country tuned out the place around them and watched only the images of the country they came from. The US stopped being a melting pot it was in the early 80s.

Satellite TV increased the availability of foreign TV and made it bad.

Then came internet and cheap or free international video calls. Final nail in the coffin of being Roman in Rome.

Today one can live anywhere in the world physically but live virtually anywhere in the world or for that matter anytime in the past. One could choose to live in 1960s and watch only video and read articles about that time frame in that place in the world. Social networking created huge generation gap.

So, I believe that we have many more virtual countries in every country and people are more distant than they ever were.

I am not so sure if this is progress.

Food for thought from a retired techie who has seen the changes and can guess what is coming.



 

Easy vegetable garden without using extra water is doing just fine.

How did I do it? The beauty is any one with just 12 sq. ft of open space can do it.

Material: Plastic pots with about 12 to 16" diameter on the top, 6 to 8" diameter at the bottom, potting mix (not potting soil) and peat moss combination with a touch of miracle gro powder (No need to pay premium for potting mix with Miracle gro). Pay the price for a well grown plant to start with. Do not even think of starting this when the night time temperature is below 50 unless you have indoor sun room.

Put a basin in the kitchen sink to collect water as you use normally. A basin full can water 3 plants easily. I am sure you use 3 to 4 basin fulls of water very easily per day. That is about 12 plants.

I planted in early may in Fremont, CA about 3 weeks ago. I have 2 large tomato plants, 3 small ones struggling to grow in clay soil transplanted, 2 celantro, 4 egg plants, 2 bell peppers. Just 1 week after planting we started using celantro in the kitchen and it is more than keeping up.

Even elderly folks can water them because they are raised above ground level.
You can put them on a plastic stoll if you wish for more height.

I am also saving Laundry water in a 33 gallon trash container and using it for watering fruit trees, roses, grasses, planted in the back yard. May be fine even for lawn. Top soil absorbs any soap and good enough water seeps down to roots. Big difference in growth of grapes and roses.

Happy and low water gardening to you...

How easy it is to conserve water even with a large lawn.

I have about 8000 sq ft of lawn and a German Shepherd enjoys it a lot and it keeps the house much cooler along with trees. When I moved in to this home almost 20years, the previous watering schedule was total 60min 10 min per one set of sprinklers every day, total 420minutes. I immediately cut it to 15min * 6 *3 times a week to 270 minutes and lawn was fine. I answered the recent call to cut water use by 20% due to drought and reduced it to 17min * 6 * 2 times a week to 204 minutes and the lawn survived. The we had rain for 1hr and I shut off water for 10 days and had another 1hr of rain. I shut off water for total 4 weeks that way. Now we have no rain forecast anytime soon. So, I thought if 1hr of rain can sustain the lawn for 10 days, I will try 20min * 6 * once a week to 120min.

Then I started looking at what else we can do to be green and still maintain a sample of flowers and vegetables we have. Re-landscaping so much space can be several thousand dollars and also heat up the place in the coming summer. Not ready to do that.

I already have efficient toilets and appliances.

I came to know that one of our friends stopped using dish washer which uses 7 gallons a day. They were hand washing. Running water continuously for 2 min is about a a gallon at low flow rate for washing dishes. They were collecting the water and using it for the garden. Another friend told me that they were collecting water when they are in the shower using a bucket just to gather the water instead letting it flow as they wash off. When I did that, I found it was about 4 gallons a day for 2 people having 1 or 2 showers a day.

Then I looked at another big consumer of water. Clothes washing machine. It consumes 25 gallons per load. I spent $8 and got an extra drain hose to extend the drain to a container just outside on the patio. Actually collected 25 gallons.

What is all this adding up to?

Kitchen 6 gallons, bath 4 gallons, 2 loads of laundry per week imply 7 gallons a day. Total 17 gallons. More than enough to water all my plants. I essentially cut a whopping 500 gallons a month on top of lowering the lawn watering from what used to be 420minutes a week to 120minutes a week. Not sure exactly but perhaps this chart can help in calculating sprinkler water and water use in general.

My garden sprinker system uses 1/2" pipe. In 120 minutes, I am using perhaps 1260 gallons per week or 5000 gallons per month. So, in spite of 8000 sq ft of lawn, my total consumption per person given 2 people in the house is probably under 10000 gallons a month which is about 150 gal per person per day.

Before the drought, each Californian on the average was using 180 gallons a day! So, even with the lawn I am down to average having reduced consumption by 60% compared to what this house used 20 yrs ago when I moved in.

Sad thing is even if every household does this in California they only account for 10 to 20% of all water use. The biggest use is agriculture.

Water Use in California

"Approximately nine million acres of farmland in California are irrigated, representing roughly 80% of all human water use."

What else can California do?

In no particular order of my thoughts.

Ask the farmers to switch to water efficient crops. Every one now knows that it takes 1 gallon of water to grow one almond.

May be something like container gardening is required to use less water.

May be all the industries should be mandated to recycle water much like power plants do.

All the major public gardens, golf courses huge landscapes should use only recycled gray water.

All new construction must have gray water systems builtin for landscape and toilets.

Perhaps at home we can use some of the methods used while camping. Wipe and re-use the plate and re-use the glass of drinking water. Wipe the pans cleans instead of washing. In the short term that means we use more paper towels but then we can always use cloth rags, wash and recycle the washing machine water.

In the short term, import food and let tax payers chip in to provide living income to farmers as they change their methods to use less water. Probably much cheaper to do that than lot of other ways.

Educate others around us in what we are doing and hope to make the water saving a way of life.

I am not in favor of more desalination. Too much potential harm.

Use tools to calculate your water use. You can identify the big uses and do something about them.