Grey Water – the solution to maintaining your landscape

Save precious water and lower your H2O Footprint

This is the year when Grey Water goes mainstream. Grey Water has been around a long time. At the Santa Barbara Mission dedicated in 1786, there are aqueducts that took the wash water and distributed the outfall to the Mission garden.

There are so many practical applications for grey water that we felt were archaic, unnecessary in our modern society, or just plain icky to consider. Not so anymore. Most of the water that we can re- use has to do with washing; washing our bodies and washing our clothes. And the water that comes off our bodies and our clothes isn’t really that dirty. How soiled could we be? Also a great deal of the water we use to shower isn’t even used by us, it’s the water we run getting it hot enough, the water running in the sink while you brush your teeth or washing your hands after using the toilet. These little habits are hard to break. But imagine how much better you would feel showering or washing your clothes, knowing that that same water was going to be used to water your plants.

Until about 4 years ago only renegades built grey water systems, or those people who had over taxed septic systems, or the communes of the sixties who hated to waste any resource that was free. The best, fail-proof greywater systems are simple and low tech. They transport greywater from your fixtures directly to your landscape with no filters or tanks. Water is delivered into mulch basins, or shallow depressions in the soil that are filled with recycled wood-chip mulch, which provides a biological filter that distributes water safely below the soil surface and into plant root zones. You can get as sophisticated as you want in how you utilize this water but the important thing is that you use this water and don’t waste it by putting it into the sewer.

The drought has shown us that the need is great and that we have less and less water to waste. Users are reviving a solution, grey water. It is so simple that it just takes some plumbing, some know how, and some labor. This is the year is the year to consider installing your own grey water system.

Here is what to do. First, go online and read about what is involved at www.coastalgreywater.org or go to www.oasisdesign.net and pick up some of the books written on the subject. There are “How To” seminars this spring to attend throughout the Monterey Bay area. Landscape Contractors who belong to the California Landscape Contractors Association (CLCA) have been attending training seminars so they can help water consumers become water re-users.

We are all learning to live with limited resources and trying to do our share to not waste anything. So, join the movement. Be proud of how you chose to spend your dollars and keep your yard looking good without having to spend that money on water bills. One month of paying for 4th and 5th tier water rates will pay for the whole system. When your neighbors asks you what you’re doing let them know you have joined a movement to save your landscape by using the water that runs through your house. Then ask them to join the movement. It’s the right thing to do.