Gardening and Conservation

The drought continues in Atlanta, where the watershed doesn't meet the needs of a metropolis that continues to grow with little restrictions. Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, claims that "Georgians use more water and more energy per person than the national average" and that "you can never 'drought-proof a metro area that grows by a million people every decade while repeatedly failing to plan for sustainable growth and invest in measures to use water more efficiently."

Yet, despite the continuing drought, water restrictions have been eased in some counties in metro Atlanta. Here in Dekalb County, we are under a level four drought declaration which allows citizens to irrigate personal food gardens and to water plants with a hand-held hose for 25 minutes on designated days. In fact, I just read the updated restrictions and realized how conservative I have been with my water use the past few months.

I have gardened all my life, beginning with the vegetable garden in which I was required to hoe weeds when I was a kid. I love gardening. My favorite memories of both of my grandmothers are connected with gardens: my short and fat grandmother Ruby Benton, flat on her back like a June bug, having fallen over when trying to straddle a row of crowder peas, holding up her hands and laughing as I reach to pull her up from the ground; my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat hiring me as a teenager one summer to help her re-shape all her flower beds and all the years thereafter sharing seeds and plants with me as I moved around the country, far from Tarkington Prairie and Old River, where Coles and Dugats first settled in Texas.

Here in metro Atlanta, in our little urban yard, my husband and I have ripped out traditional plants such as boxwoods and have planted blueberry bushes, strawberries, herbs and vegetables (lemon grass from a friend in Louisiana, a chilipiquin--also known as chiltecpin, chiltepin, bird eye pepper--from my father, basil, dill, cilantro, rosemary, lemon balm, serranos, Sungold tomatoes, etc.), flowers and native plants from Georgia Perimeter College Botanical Garden.

To care for these plants, we've connected a rain barrel to a downspout behind our house, we've mulched the plants, and we have become more careful conservators of the water we use in our house.

I first started paying attention to the length of my showers, limiting shower time to 3-5 minutes, and I never take real baths anymore. How I miss those long, hot soaks in water perfumed with bath salts. I don't let the water run while I brush my teeth or wash my hands. For a while, we kept a bucket in the shower to catch gray water. More recently, I've begun to conserve the cold water that usually runs down the drain while the shower water is warming. Unlike my daughter, who claims she immediately jumps into her shower, no matter how cold it is at the beginning, I have always let the water run until the water turns tepid. Now I keep an enamel bowl in the bathroom, in which I catch the cold water. I put the bowl of water aside when the water just begins to warm. After my shower, I pour the cold water into two-liter soda bottles that we now keep at-the-ready in the bathroom.

The first time I did this, I was shocked to discover that almost 2 liters of water go down the drain while my shower is warming up. That water now goes on my garden, on whatever plants seem to need it the most at the moment.

I am trying to see how I can sustain my vegetables, herbs, and flowers with these measures: collecting rain water and conserving household water that would otherwise go down the drain. By the time I give in to the more liberal level-four restrictions, irrigating food gardens with no restrictions and watering other plants with a hand-held hose, even those watering techniques may be banned. By that time, then, my garden will be dead. As will all our gardens if we do not become better stewards of our diminishing resources.