Dropping In : Technology provides some complex improvements on old garden-soaking methods.
In this post-drought world, getting water to your lawn can get as complicated as putting a satellite into orbit. But ultimately, it is quite economical.
Recent landscape trade publications have been carrying headlines like “Statewide Water-Efficient Landscaping Ordinance to Shape Look of New Homes and Buildings in California.” Although the homes referred to are ones in which a professional landscaper has been brought in prior to sale, what’s happening simultaneously is the creation of an industry devoted to water-misering. More drip for your dollar. High-tech comes to the lowly sprinkler system.
Ken Fay of Aqua Flo, a landscaping equipment supply company in Ojai, was my guide to this brave new world. “No runoff” is his main article of faith, meaning we keep water from escaping our land and going down the storm drain.
The solution is “matched precipitation” or putting water on evenly. “Overlapping sprinklers are wasteful,” he says. And then there’s the trick of doing the watering so it won’t evaporate in the noonday sun. Midnight is better. In fact, 3 a.m. is best.
Are you getting the picture? This is a job for an automaton, not a casual gardener. “There’s been a boom in technology,” Fay said. And then this man of the soil handed me a sheaf of specifications equal to anything anybody was ever handed in an episode of “Star Trek.” These documents reveal that such phenomena as low gallonage, dripline flushing, turf irrigation, evapotranspiration, substandard subsurface drip and “the clothesline effect” can be dealt with by means of irri-namic tubing, compensation cells, maxijets, valve labyrinths, laser-perforated tubing and (my personal favorite) vibra-clean emitter heads. Believe it or not, stuff like this is readily available right here in Ventura County--at places like Home Depot, Builders Emporium or Green Thumb in addition to Fay’s establishments in Ojai and Goleta.
The point of the exercise is that you can save a lot on watering your lawn and garden--or even your orchard or strawberry field--by putting in some technology. Savings are immediate, fortunately. Steve Snow, a spokesman for Toro, a major irrigation and sprinkler manufacturer whose wares are widely available in this county, said his neighbor pays $90 a month to water his grounds but Snow, who put in a rig made by his employer, pays $55 a month.
Getting even further down-to-earth, there’s really good eco-news about water-saving devices for home and garden. They’re beginning to make this stuff from recycled materials. Last year, a company called Moisture Master ground up 500,000 used tires to make soaker hoses to put in the flower beds.
Whether laid on the ground or buried under it, a length of this stuff weeps water into the soil at a controlled rate. This company also makes a brand of garden hose out of recycled rubber. Moisture Master is growing so fast they’ll need to recycle 700,000 tires next year. That’s still only 15% of the 4.6 million discarded tires already being recapped, ground up for pavement, etc. Alas, even that impressive statistic is dwarfed by the number of tires thrown away. That’s over 200 million. I mention this in a column about gourmet lawn sprinklers because it shows how, in this wide world of eco-savings, one thing is connected to another in unexpected ways.
Drought is no stranger to residents of this county. What is new is that it has moved in to places that didn’t know it in the past. Like Seattle. Almost half the water districts in the whole of America are currently under some sort of control due to shortages. And no relief is in sight. Thus, the boom in techno water saving.
Our county resources agency is working on a “landscape plan” design that will dovetail with the state Assembly’s AB 325 in mandating certain water economy characteristics for residential and commercial landscaping of new buildings. However, it does not cover you and me watering our lawn with the (recycled, I hope) hose. That’s the province of the water company--and they’ll tell us on our bill whether we’re water wasters or not.
* FYI
Moisture Master watering systems are available in Ventura County at Home Depot, Builders Emporium and Green Thumb. Toro sprinkler systems are available at Aqua Flo Supply in Ojai, Smith Pipe and Supply in Newbury Park and Coast Irrigation in Westlake Village. Note: simply putting an automatic on and off attachment on your existing sprinkler system can cut water bills in half.
