Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

else can you do? You can collect rainwater to irrigate your garden, literally capturing water off the large watershed that is your roof. Rain barrels make this easy, and they’re getting easier to find. Your roof has a large amount of surface area, and it’s focused in sometimes as few as four downspouts. Position a rain barrel under one or more of those downspouts and you can capture the rain as it comes down off your roof.

You’d be surprised how much water you can collect this way. If it’s raining hard, you’ll fill up a 55-gallon rain barrel—with 300 to 400 feet of surface area leading to one downspout—in just an hour or two. And you can certainly put up multiple barrels. I had to fight tooth and nail to get just one rain barrel, since my wife has aesthetic issues with it. And the only reason it’s still there is that it’s full of water and she can’t move it.

Ed rigged up this ugly rain barrel, but it is kind of handy for watering my ornamentals.

         Every time I leave the house, I risk coming back to some weird contraption. In this case, Ed had cut one of our rain gutters and installed this horrible, ugly orange barrel. I can live with some things. I can actually live with a lot of things. But they have to look good.

Ed tells me he’s found some more attractive rain barrels, even some made out of stone. I don’t know if the man can be trusted when it comes to aesthetics; he clearly has other priorities. But if he’s found an attractive rain barrel, I’m all for it. I don’t want to waste water out in the garden, especially when rainwater is free.

Of course I understand why Rachelle says that these orange rain barrels are ugly, but to me, the sight of the Owens Valley—about 250 miles from Los Angeles, where we’ve robbed the area of the water and the dust blowing around is giving the residents respiratory ailments—is much uglier. And if you put it that way, Rachelle would probably even agree.

If you can irrigate your ornamental plants with saved rainwater, you will cut your water bill considerably. And if your wife takes long showers, well, then you really need to look into this rain-barrel system.

The other thing you really should do, if you’re going to use rain barrels—or just as part of your regular home maintenance—is get up on the roof and clean the rain gutters. You want to make sure the water you collect in your rain barrels is as clean as possible, and cleaning the gutters of leaves and other detritus will definitely help. We’ve got four feral cats living on our roof, so God knows what else is up there. But getting rid of the leaves is a good first step.

You’ll want to position the rain barrel on some stones or even make a platform if you’re handy, but remember it has to be quite substantial; that barrel is going to get very, very heavy when it’s full of water. The idea is to position the rain barrel high enough so you can get a bucket underneath the spigot, which is down at the bottom.

When you’re ready to use that water in your garden—or if the barrel is nearly full and more rain is predicted—open the spigot and drain some of that collected rainwater into another container or two, or twenty.

It’s important to point out that this water shouldn’t be used for drinking. It’s not potable—and you might even want to put a sign on the barrel to this effect, so you don’t get sued by anyone. Certainly if you have cats living on the roof, as I have, you should be very careful. By the same token, unless you’re sure it’s very clean water, you wouldn’t want to use it on anything that will be eaten, so don’t water your vegetable garden with it. You’d have to have a very clean area to collect rainwater to use it on food. Instead, use it for watering your ornamentals or your lawn, if you still have one.

Other Ways to Garden

I’ve addressed a lot of things you can do in your own yard, but what if you don’t have a yard? Let’s say you have an apartment or a condo.

Well, many kinds of fruit trees, herbs, and vegetables can be grown very successfully in pots. If you have a balcony or a patio or even just a front step that gets some sun, you can grow a surprising amount of food.

If you’ve got a south-facing window, you can also grow some cherry tomatoes indoors, as well as some types of herbs.

A lot of people have rooftop gardens, too. That’s another great way for city dwellers to grow food.

And if you want to garden on a larger scale, you can become part of a community garden. They’ve got them all over. There are community gardens in cities including

• New York

• L.A.

• Fresno, California

• Chicago

• Fairbanks, Alaska

• Huntsville, Alabama

• Boulder, Colorado

• Hartford, Connecticut

• Atlanta

• Gainesville, Florida

• Indianapolis

• Des Moines

And if there isn’t one near you, start your own. A group called Urban Farming (www.urbanfarming.org) helps people around the nation start community gardens.

Here’s how a community garden works. Essentially, the city donates the plot of land, usually an unused lot in a developed area. They may say, “This is an old Department of Water and Power lot that we don’t use anymore. We’re going to give this to people to grow food.” There’s a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a whole big thing.

Everyone who signs up for an allotment is given an area that’s maybe 20 feet by 30 feet to tend and plant in whatever way they choose. You can grow food there or flowers or whatever you want. There’s water available to you, but you do have to bring in your