As long as it is grey (and not black) water, you can reuse some of your water for non-consumption purposes – that means, you can’t use it for drinking, cooking, showering or watering edible plants (fruit tress are ok).

When using grey water, use it over the largest area possible to reduce the impact and build up of any contaminants in your soil. The use of slotted pipes is effective for spreading the water across a larger area, too.If piping grey water onto your garden, it is best to have the pipes underground. This has a number of benefits:

• No pipes for anyone to trip over or move away from where you want themKids and pets can’t access the pipe and drink the waterWater reaches the roots of your plants instead of possibly running off the soil
• Any spray won’t land on the leaves of edible plants 
• There is less spread of any chemicals and bacteria in the water

Remember that grey water can’t be stored for more than 24 hours unless it is being treated before use.Note that you can only use grey water on your property – do not allow if to run off into the street on your neighbour’s property.

Posted: January 16th, 2008 under gardening, general, saving water.
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If you have tank water, you can wash your car at home whenever you like. Of course, to save water you may prefer to use a commercial car wash or ensure you only use buckets of water and wash your car on the lawn.

Without your own tank water, you can use a bucket of water to clean windows, lights and mirrors, or spot clean any corrosive substances. Under stage 3a restrictions, for a full car wash, you must use a commercial car wash facility that uses less than 70 litres per car and recycles water.Note that if we move to stage 4 restrictions, even commercial car washes will have to use buckets for washing.

Posted: January 15th, 2008 under general, saving water.
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It is important to keep your gutters clean and in good repair. Cleaning gutters is the perfect opportunity to look at the state of your gutters, your roof and where the two connect.However, cleaning gutters is potentially dangerous so please consider the following tips when doing this task:

• Have someone with you to hold the ladder and help if there is a problem
•  Be patient – you will be up and down and moving the ladder repeatedly so just accept that it part of the job
•  Don’t reach too far from your body
•  Wear gloves and/or use an implement to actually clean the gutters – there could be something sharp or with a bite hidden below other debris

If you are present when someone does fall from a ladder and isn’t moving, do not move them and call an ambulance. Even if the person gets up and seems to be ok, a trip to a doctor is advisable as there may be injuries you can’t see.

Posted: January 13th, 2008 under gardening.
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A natural, cheap and easy-to-get pest repellent is flour, and it doesn’t take any water to use either.

To use it, just sprinkle it liberally over the dry leaves of the infested plant(s). Repeat after any rain as long as necessary to get rid of the bugs.

It is effective against cherry slugs (tiny little slugs that love cherry trees) and all other slugs as sliding over it dehydrates them so the go away or die.

You can use talcum powder in the same way, but the production of talc is not sustainable so flour is more ecologically sound.

Posted: January 12th, 2008 under gardening, green products.
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With a tank to collect your rainwater, you can save a lot of water in your house by using tank water for things such as flushing the toilet and washing clothes as these functions don’t have to use drinkable water.

But what happens when your tank is empty? Maybe it hasn’t rained for weeks or months, maybe you had a lot of visitors and they used up the tank water faster than usual, and now you can’t use tank water to flush your toilet.

Well, you could resort to using buckets of water from the shower/bath or straight form a tap. However, the easier method is to install some sort of switching device in your plumbing system.

A switch will automatically use tap water when there is not enough tank water available. This means you can save water most of the time but not face the inconvenience of an empty tank.

** Connecting your tank to the house pipes and adding a switching device need to be done by a licensed plumber.

Posted: January 9th, 2008 under collecting water, green products.
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Have you ever thought about the creation of water (oceans, rivers, etc) on Earth?

Most of us have heard about the Big Bang theory and evolution, but the story behind water is less known - certainly less talked about.

An interesting blog entry called Water: the lifeblood of our planet outlines the most common theories of water arriving on Earth in large bodies and is worth a read. Or just look at their magnificent pictures of masses of water.

Posted: January 8th, 2008 under general, nature's gift.
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If you are setting up a veggie/herb garden and want some tough (as in can survive in little water) plants, try any of the following:

• bronze fennel (will grow wild if not monitored)
• cherry tomatoes
• artichokes
• garlic
• garlic chives
• lemon balm
• warrigal spinach
• Japanese parsley
• marjoram
• apple mint (less so if you use the variegated specis)
• rosemary
• cucumber
• eggplant
• zucchini
• pumpkin
• burdock
• perennial beans
• zebra beans
• spring onion
• established silver beet

If you choose a mix of these veggies and others than use more water, try separating your garden bed into two parts so you only need to water one part frequently.

Plants grown from seed will be much hardier than ones you have transplanted.

Posted: January 6th, 2008 under gardening, saving water.
Comments: 1

In 2000, we ranked 3rd of daily urban water use in the OECD - not something we want to rank highly in really. Denmark manages an average os only 120L per person.

According to estimaes from teh Australian Bureau of STatistics (ABS), AUstralian domestic water usage is n average of 272 litres per day (about 103,000 litres per year) in 2004/05. That’s a LOT of water.

Per state use varies a bit:

Victoria - 222L
WA - 493L
NT - 419L
Tasmania - 392L
Qld - 340L
ACT - 260L
SA - 258L
NSW - 230L

Picture the 10 litre bucket in your laundry - now imagine 22 of them full of water. Does it shock you that you may use more water than that every day?

Posted: January 5th, 2008 under general, nature's gift.
Comments: 1

We were recently offered some carpet offcuts to use as mulch on our garden. We said thanks, but no thanks!

Yes, carpet over your garden will reduce evaporation from the soil into the air and the growth of weeds. However, it will also reduce (stop) the amount of water getting to the soil so will actually cause the soil to dry out.

And a synthetic carpet isn’t going to break down into nice nutrients for our plants either.

So we’re sticking to natural mulch options!

Posted: January 4th, 2008 under gardening.
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Overall, the water coming out of your laundry is perfectly usable on most of your garden or even for flushing toilets.

You can use this water by collecting it in buckets you then carry out to your garden, connecting a length of flexible pipe to the outlet and hand-watering your garden or by connecting pipes from the laundry to the garden permanently.

If you have the water piped form your laundry, remember to have a diverter added in as well. A diverter means you can control when the water goes onto your garden and when it goes into the sewer system.It is best to not use laundry water on your garden when:

•  It is raining heavily (there is no point overloading the soil and causing more runoff)
• The washing includes dirty nappies or other particularly dirty items
•  You have used bleach
• You are cleaning something greasy or toxic in the laundry trough

Posted: January 2nd, 2008 under general, saving water.
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