Don't Waste That Water

When we lived in Santa Barbara, we had the opportunity to rent a cabin in the mountains for a year while Art and Lynn and their daughter Maya travelled in Central America. There were forty fruit trees and numerous other plants and we had strict instructions on how to care for them. (It was a 26-page lease, which was a little excessive for rainbow children, we thought, but we let it go. The year turned into two and a half. It was magical. Even through the rodents. I never expect to be able to share living quarters with a canyon wren again, for instance.)

Water in arid climates is a precious commodity and plants need water; some need lots of water. Art figured he’d let no drop of water get wasted, and reworked the rudimentary plumbing of their cabin so that all water except from the toilet got used at least twice.

There was a shower outside, solar-heated, and it watered the peach tree. The kitchen sink drained onto the kumquat tree. The outflow from the washing machine drained wherever I put the hose that day; sometimes it was avocados, sometimes the chayote tangle, sometimes the passionfruit or papaya. Santa Barbara is just at the northern tip of “subtropical” and some of these plants didn’t thrive, but the chayote wasn’t one of them. We ate chayote in soup the entire time.

Art has just finished revising his graywater book. He sold the manufacturing part of his business (biocompatible soaps) a long time ago and now concentrates on designing for biocompatible living — graywater is a tiny part of that whole endeavor.

It’s an important part, nonetheless: see the new, improved, revised edition of Create an Oasis with Graywater.