Inner City Farmer

Yesterday morning it rained so hard I thought my house was going to get swept down the street. As happy as the storm made me, it also highlighted one of the main deficiencies of my little urban farm—I don’t have any sort of rainwater harvesting system installed… yet. Seeing all that water fall from the sky and then disappear just as quickly was hard to take. Capturing rainwater has just jumped up about ten places on my to-do list.

In the absence of such a system Zephyr and I do are best to conserve the water we take from the city. We water our garden at night and only when the plants really need it. We remember to turn the faucet off when we’re brushing our teeth. We have a makeshift greywater system in place, a hose that dumps the discharge from our washing machine into the back yard. And we habitually bathe together and save the water to use on our plants outside. Check out this sterling footage of us collecting our dirty bath water.

We do all this because we believe water is precious and undervalued in our society and we’re preparing for a future where we will surely not be able to use it the way we do now. I’ll admit that our water consumption has skyrocketed in the past few months in conjunction with the start of our garden. There’s a reason our plants look so good—they get watered just about everyday. We are using about 40 percent more water now than we did five months ago, but our monthly water bill has only increased… by less than three dollars! To me, that’s fucked up.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Urban Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.