How to save water and still keep the plants alive in summer

[imafan26]

There is no doubt the summers are coming sooner and are getting hotter. Well, maybe this year was a smidge better,. However, my water rates keep going up and I am using an average of 7K gallons a month. My usual summer use is 11-13 K gallons for my 3000 sqft yard (approx minus the footprint of the house. In the rainy season I have gotten my water use to 3-4 K a month. The increase use is almost all for the yard. Even in low usage times, I still am watering the yard almost everyday. The sprinkler is just off and I don't water if it rains heavily. I figure my actual water that goes down the sewer is really around 2000 gallons at the most. I have maximally conserved indoors.
I have lost plants because as the water became less affordable, I had to cut down on watering and some plants could not handle that. My sprinkler head was cracked and I did not notice until the grass started to die out. I still have to fix the sprinkler head the neighbor broke.
I am still weeding the backyard and putting down weed cloth when I can to make it easier to weed and because I don't have grass there anyway and the sprinkler heads have all been capped off.

Some plants are surviving on their own with my sporadic watering. I have moved some plants to group them or put them in the back where I do water so they get water on a more regular basis

I actually have full rain barrels and I only emptied one 55 gallon barrel once this summer. It is full again so I need to empty it again.

I usually make a 50/50 peatlite mix, but I have been adding more peat moss so the pots won't dry out as fast in the summer. I will find out if that comes back to bite me when the rainy season comes.

I do have to replace some plants
I am replacing blue daze with dwarf chenille plant because the red goes better with the euphorbia and it can grow with even less water than blue daze.

The agapanthus are shrinking in size to cope with having less water. It is noticeable to me, but it is a strategy that does keep them alive. I had replaced the cuphea with geraniums, but the geraniums are tall and interfere with the roses and these are not the red geraniums I thought I had, they were scented and they don't bloom as much. The scale is also attacking and weakening them. I have alyssum in part of it, but the HOA keeps citing me because they billow over onto the driveway, so I am think I may put the cuphea back since it does not grow as fast and needs less pruning. The scale does bother it, but not as bad as the geraniums and roses.

I am considering building more sips since they use water very efficiently.

What are you doing to conserve water and make you garden more drought resistant

[jeff84]

get a few of these. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=ib ... ORM=HDRSC2 have the downspout of your gutter go into one and tie them all together with a valve that you can attach your garden hose to. you could even have one as a dedicated compost tea brewer, and use the others to fill it.

[rainbowgardener]

This has been mentioned before and is something I would really like to do. You can find them used but clean on craigslist for as little as $50 (in the continental US) or a bit more if they already have a hookup for a garden hose.

We had a pretty wet summer and I didn't water a lot until August hit. But now things are drying up and I am watering....

I do keep everything well mulched. When I water (which is all with the hose, no sprinklers or irrigation system), I water deeply and then don't water again until things are showing signs of wilting.

[Gary350]

40 years ago I lived in a different house, I got under the house and changed the plumping pipes so the only thing that flushed down to the city sewer was the toilet. Kitchen sink, bathroom sink, shower, washer all went to the garden in a 1.5" diameter PVC drain pipe. I mounded the soil up like a levee and put a sheet of plastic inside to hold water. My water collecting pond was too small at first I had to make it larger. Then I routed all the roof gutters to the garden too my collection pond it was too small a big rain needs a holding pond for 1500 gallons of water. Rain gutters were all collecting water in 3" PVC pipe all the way to the garden. I buried garden hoses under the levee any time I needed water I drained the pond with the hoses. You have raised beds you will need a $30 Little Giant water pump with a float switch. I hope this gives you some useful ideas.

When I lived in Arizona i made the mistake of buying a house in an HOA neighbor hood. Every street had its own volunteer Gestapo spy that snitched on every one that was not doing what he wanted. I mowed my grass every Saturday weather it needed it or not but I received an HOA notice very Friday that it needed to be cut. In AZ nothing grows without irrigation so I turned the water down 90% and hardly ever had to mow the grass after that. Gestapo spy would look through the cracks in the fence gate to find things to complain about in my back yard so I smeared mud in all the cracks so he could not see in. LOL. Snooty neighbor next door thought he was too good to look at my TV antenna so he complained, HOA sent me a notice to take the TV antenna down so I gave HOA a copy of Federal Law told them, take me to court I hope your that stupid. HOA neighborhoods are spreading like Cancer those neighborhoods attract a lot of narcissistic personality disorder snooty people. I got tired of HOA, snooty neighbors, and Arizona all about the same time, sold the house and moved away. LOL The guy across the street was a nice guy he got fed up with HOA and moved away about 3 months before me. A guy 6 houses up the street was a truck driver every 2 weeks his 18 wheeler was parked in front of his house, HOA gave him a notice to have it gone in 7 days, he always laughed about it an said, I am always gone in 3 or 4 days those idiots have been sending me notices for 2 years. LOL If you live in an HOA neighborhood your not allowed to own a pickup truck it offends all the snooty people. LOL Not allowed to own a, drill press, arc welder, garden tiller, air compressor, Van or SUV taller than 7 feet. There was about 40 pages of rules.

[imafan26]

I live with the commies too. That is why I only have grass in the front yard and I am trying to weed block most of the back yard. I have rain barrels. I only have 16 ft of gutter and that is only because I have floor to ceiling jalousie windows and the rain used to pool and splash through them into the house. The gutter does empty into my rain barrels. I have three and I want to get another one and put them together in tandem. Two are connected now and the third collects water even though the plug is still in place. I need to ask my sister to get me another one. I actually have never emptied my rain barrels completely so I don't need extra capacity. I am limited with what I do with the water. I usually have a 5 gallon bucket of the rain water and I dip my orchids one by one. It is time consuming but 10 gallons of water can do the 2.5 benches in my front yard. and another three buckets will water the rose, bamboo, hibiscus, and gardenia pots I have in the front yard. I just emptied 55 gallons about 3 weeks ago on the grass and the barrels are full again. I only use the rain water on ornamentals.

I have inquired about those containers. I would have to bury it because it is too big to hide from the HOA. A tank like that costs about $400 here.

I have the herbs and edibles in the back yard so I don't do systemic pesticides and I only use potable water there. Mr. Lincoln HT rose in the back yard gets the most sprays usually 3in1 to control powdery mildew. I cut the hibiscus to control the white flies and I am not seeing them now. I will have to pull out the cucumber. It has mildew and the snails are eating the fruit.

These are the materials I have available for mulch: weed block, newspaper, a little bit of cardboard, plastic bag (from potting mix), compost, and I will have to find another source for pine needles
I have only three zones being sprinkled now and they are all the micro drippers.

[thanrose]

Laughing at the HOA stories... But you don't have to have an HOA to have neighbors complain about stuff. Everyone is a jerk some of the time, but some people carry it to an artform. Overwhelmed with memories of ugly, funny, outrageous stuff neighbors do to each other.

Imafan, have you tried burying olla, or fired clay urns, in next to your more drought vulnerable plants and shrubs? I've not done it, but always wanted to try. The roots will be drawn to the damp terra cotta which releases water osmotically as the soil around it dries. I don't have the money to just bury huge terra cotta pots, and I think in my present location, the tree roots would gang up and crush the pots within two years.

[imafan26]

Olla are actually not easy to find here. I do have strawberry pots, even those are hard to find now. I have used moisture beads before. They work well in summer but when the rains come they bubble up out of the soil and make a gelatinous mess that kills plants. It is not practical for me to repot every plant for the monsoon season, so the media I use is designed to dry fast which is a detriment in summer. I have tried double potting and it helps some plants. But, ultimately, I have to water more, using 3 times more water in summer. The in ground plants usually survive. It is the potted plants that have problems.

[thanrose]

Okay, gotcha. Actually, any terra cotta pot is becoming a thing of the past here, too. I might try using hypertufa pots of my own creation. I've got a couple of ideas on that which I might test out in the autumn.

Don't know if this applies to where you are, but we get so freaking hot here that anything in a pot runs a serious risk of baking the roots. Watered or not, the roots that touch the pot will wither in summer. Mid summer will also make me regret using any metal stake or support for plants by injuring them wherever they touch the metal. Reminds me of when I lived in Boston and had to keep the plant leaves from touching the windows in my frozen tiny apartment.

I really do love window boxes, but any container is just not insulated enough to slow down evaporation and prevent damaged roots. I'm sure it's possible, but I'll have to play with double layered construction with a deeper and wider planting area.

You might try double potting some things and see if it slows the water loss, or putting the pots in holes in the ground.

[imafan26]

I do heel in some plants because they fall over. Others I have to be careful to lift. When the ficus looks happy, you know it is trying to escape out the drain hole again. I do group pots and my humidity is high and baked roots are not so much a problem as scorched leaves. I don't have saucers under my pots. It is the first thing I pull off and toss. Could I use a soda bottle as an ola pot with a nail hole dripper. I did try it once, but maybe I did not do it right because the water did not last even 10 minutes.

[thanrose]

I haven't had success with the 2 liter bottle trick, even with a hollow spike that is supposed to let the inserted bottle drip go deeper in the soil. I'm thinking that we use too loose a potting medium for it to work, maybe. The device is supposed to make water available, but osmosis is part of the equation. When the mix right at the drip hole is saturated, it shouldn't drip any more until the mix dries out a bit. Hmm, maybe a peat plug right under the drip hole will slow it down. Or wrap the aperture in felt or sponge. Not so much to cause a major rot festival, though. I'll look through Instructables https://www.instructables.com/ to see if anyone has addressed this.

I agree. Ten minutes, tops, for me. The water just chugs out the bottom.

[rainbowgardener]

Pin hole not nail hole and put sand in the bottle.

[imafan26]

Ok, I'll try that and see if it works better.