Water Restrictions

Our county has finally enacted water restrictions. We've had water "suggestions" since I've been here, but this is the first time I remember being given restrictions with promises of consequences.

I'm fine with that. In fact, I've added some other water-saving measures here at home. And part of that is due to my cyber-friend, Psycho Anita. Here is her post about being cheap...with dental floss and water.

Now, there is no point saving the water that runs from the shower before it gets hot. Our hot water heater is upstairs, right by the bathrooms. We get virtually instant hot water. That is not the case, however, in the kitchen sink.

So I've instituted a policy whereby all water that runs in the kitchen is saved and taken to the plants in the back yard. We put a container over the garbage disposal (and I haven't told the guys yet that I want to them through food scraps instead of using the disposal...you know, I bet we use a gallon a water every time we run that thing.), and I've put the dishpan in the sink. Dishwater is to be poured on the trees and bushes. The water in the small sink where the disposal is located, is usually rinse water, hand washing water, vegetable cleaning water. Pretty clean. So we are using that outside too.

And I've turned off the irrigation system altogether. We were only running it 3 times per week, but our grass in the front is still burning up and going dormant. So we've decided to just let it go for a while.

The only thing I'm not so sure of is that we are supposed to be putting on fertilizer and crab grass preventer again now. Since we can't water it in, we've elected to skip these applications. We'll try to be diligent about pulling lawn weeds.

All of that said, buddy Cassie told me this morning that Gaston County, NC has instituted some interesting water restrictions. Instead of using the even-odd watering rule, they are putting in place a system where folks on the East side of a main highway water on three days each week, and folks on the West side water the other days.

Their thinking is that it's too hard for some folks to figure out whether they live in an odd-numbered house or an even-numbered house.

Do I need to comment here that it's funny that the officials would figure that people who don't know where 1,3,5,7,9 are odd numbers would be able to tell what East and West is?

By the way, I live on the "left side" of my subdivision. Whenever I say "North side?" People don't know what I mean.