Where to water

Water restrictions should support community gardens and the backyard vegie patch, says Ben Neil, CEO of Cultivating Community (above left with gardener Sabri Kiziltam).
Photo: Simon Schluter

December 5, 2007

The inventor of permaculture is among those calling for backyard farmers to be freed from water restrictions. Katherine Kizilos reports.

IN A drought year, during an era of climate change, what does it mean to be a responsible gardener? Cactuses, paving and a sculpture near the barbecue? Or an old-fashioned vegie patch, fruit trees, herbs and a compost bin in the corner?

Some serious gardeners are now questioning the conventional wisdom that the best way to save water at a time of low rainfall is to put a clamp on the hose. While pushing the use of rainwater tanks and grey water, they also argue that growing fruit and vegetables at home is, in the words of David Holmgren, “the best thing you can be doing” for the environment.

Holmgren, with fellow Australian Bill Mollison, devised permaculture, a design system for sustainable living and land use. He puts his ideas into practice at his property, Melliodora, at Hepburn Springs, where a hectare of land supports fruit and nut trees, vegetables, chooks, geese and two goats. Although grains, some nuts and oil-producing plants are not in the mix, the property allows for a fair degree of self-sufficiency – Holmgren says this is also possible because he eats seasonally and does not rely on the “drip feed from supermarkets”. Water comes from dams and from taps connected to town water. Holmgren says the smallholding uses about one-fifth of the water “used by a market gardener or orchardist”.

According to Holmgren, “if we planted out city farms and urban areas, we could achieve a massive increase in (water) efficiency. No one is talking about this “.

Holmgren also points out that farms tend to be open expanses and need more water than a home garden, which is naturally more sheltered. In addition, “farmers use overhead sprinklers which are inefficient”. And many orchards and market gardens are sited in sunny, warm places like Mildura, where the rainfall is low, but where farmers achieve a market advantage by producing fruit and vegetables slightly ahead of the season in colder, rainier Melbourne.

Holmgren has based his calculations on water use on a 2001 Australian Bureau of Statistics study by Lenzen and Foran. The study estimated “the amount of water needed throughout the whole economy to provide final consumers with $1 worth of various goods and services”. It found that fruit and vegetables required 103 litres per $1; beef products 381 litres and dairy 680 litres.

By contrast, Melliodora uses about 20 litres of water for every $1 of fruit and vegetables produced, while the two goats that provide milk and cheese consumed about two litres per $1 of value, or 1/300th of the amount used by a dairy farm.

According to Lenzen and Foran’s figures, commercially purchased food – not including the food purchased in restaurants – accounts for about 48 per cent of the water consumed by the average Sydney household. While the water that comes out of the tap at home accounts for only 11 per cent of a household’s total water use.

For Holmgren, the data suggests that putting restrictions on watering suburban gardens makes little sense. He knows that water restrictions are necessary but proposes households be given a seasonal allocation of water, with the decision of whether to use this in the spa or on the tomatoes left to them. Under this system the price of water would “skyrocket if you exceed” the allocation.

“There are good public policy reasons that home food production is desirable,” he says. “We need policies that at least don’t impede this, even if they don’t actively support it.”

Holmgren’s ideas have been given a boost by a recent petition to the State Government; hundreds of gardeners have asked for exemptions to the water restrictions to allow them extra water for vegetables and herb plots.

In suburban Coburg, Pam Morgan is conducting an experiment. “I want to explore how much food production I can get on a city block,” she says.

For 22 years, Morgan managed the Collingwood Children’s Farm and has visited Havana to see how the Cubans increased the city’s food production by 10 times in a decade. “Fifty per cent of their food is grown there now.”

By cultivating land in the city, the Cubans were responding to embargoes which slashed the amount of petroleum available to them to transport food; urban farms reduce food miles. Morgan also wants to recycle her household’s biodegradable waste to create compost (commercial farms use petroleum-based chemicals and fertilisers). She also hopes to save water by using grey water and roof water.

Morgan argues that policy makers are approaching the water-shortage problem “from a mechanistic perspective. Minimal water use in the garden and drought-hardy plants. It ignores the issue of carbon recycling or organic waste and also of returning nutrients to the land. We are wasting resources from the city at the moment.”

According to Clive Blazey, the founder of mail-order seed company The Diggers Club, the “average person only needs about 60 square metres of space to be self-sufficient in all the potatoes, all the vegetables and the fruit that you wanted to grow. You wouldn’t have big, massive apple trees or anything. You would have espaliered trees, especially dwarf rootstock varieties that wouldn’t take up much space”. He reckons the garden would need “about 34,000 litres of water”, which could be gathered from the roof, or grey water.

Blazey is concerned that the present system of water restrictions does not make allowances “for people on a low income who want to grow their own food” and who might need help to divert grey water or set up a rainwater tank. And he believes the role of suburban gardens in reducing greenhouse gases is not appreciated.

He is irritated by the prevailing landscape aesthetic which advocates paving gardens and planting cactus “so instead of burying carbon and doing something useful you are stopping any organisms from growing under the paving and you are using plants that have so little biomass they are absolutely useless to you. What you need to be growing in your backyard is a lot of green things. Trees and shrubs and plants and food plants and not paving, concrete and bricks.”

But the water restrictions fall hardest on community gardens, where gardeners do not have the option of using grey water and where tank water, if it exists, may not be sufficient for each plot holder’s use. In addition, the morning watering requirements can be difficult for gardeners who have to travel further than the back veranda to visit their plot (while also being less efficient than watering in the evening).

Ben Neil, chief executive of Cultivating Community, which looks after 21 community gardens – just under 800 individual plots – on Ministry of Housing sites, says that when stage three water restrictions were introduced on January 1, “we lost 20 to 25 per cent of our gardeners. There was this initial feeling of ‘how are we going to cope?’ We lost quite a lot of crops.”

Since then, “some people have been quite ingenious,” he says. “A resident on the 17th floor has a pram and comes down with containers of water from the shower.” Neil is now talking to the State Government about installing more rainwater tanks in community gardens, but he also believes policy makers need to look at food-producing gardens and water restrictions in a different way.

“I believe that if local food and urban agriculture are not part of our future, it will be very, very difficult for us to face the forthcoming environmental challenges,” he says. “We must have people growing food in the city.”

By making life more difficult for gardeners, particularly community gardeners, you are not merely depriving them of a recreational and social opportunity, Neil argues. “If I don’t grow my food next to where I live, I will jump in my car and go to the supermarket and buy something that is refrigerated, wrapped in plastic and that has a massive carbon footprint.

“It’s a no-brainer. If I can’t grow food close to where I live, what am I going to do?”

www.communitygarden.org.au

The Russian-American writer Dimitry Orlov has argued, that the dysfunctional aspects of the Soviet Union created community resilience and black economies which helped during the collapse — so too this particular kind of backwards policy might be a good thing in the long run. It forces us to be more self-reliant.

The article stops short of noting a plain fact: that home food production saves water. The industrial food system and broadacre agriculture are hugely wasteful — the real gushing fractures in Australia’s water system.

This article hits an emotive note, mentioning that some elderly people are losing gardens they have tended sometimes for decades. As such it might give the impression the issue is one of appealing to the governments kindness to allow some concessions to indulge these perhaps antiquated but endearing hobbies. In fact, the issue is also a hard nosed one — it’s about saving this county’s parched arse. It’s about feeding ourselves in an era of worsening climate and decreasing energy availability.

I’m just about to update the work-in-progress reference piece, Grow Your Own – Doing the Maths with the following graph, (this version taken from a powerpoint by David Holmgren — I should have the original soon):

Lenzen and Foran applied the methodologies of embodied energy research to find out how much ‘embodied water’ was being used by various household activities. Food production was by far the largest water cost. By using existing resources combined with more rain tanks and greywater to shift large portions of food production to the suburbs (not such a radical concept insofar as in someways it’s just a return to the 1950s), we can radically reduce Australia’s water use.

So here’s the article, and a link to Marika’s petition down the bottom:

Vegie growers carry the can for everyone else

Denise Gadd
December 3, 2007

East Brunswick’s Marika Wagner says Victoria’s water restrictions make it hard to maintain her vegie plot. She wants exemptions for home growers.
Photo: Joe Armao

KEEPING thirsty tomatoes and lettuces alive has become a political hot potato.

Hundreds of gardeners have signed an online petition asking the State Government to grant an exemption under the restrictions to allow them extra water for vegetable and herb plots.

The petition asks the Government to acknowledge that home produce gardens are different from ornamental gardens and education was the key to saving water, “not wiping out the humble vegie patch”.

Under stage 3A restrictions, gardeners are restricted to hand watering from 6am to 8am two days a week, but petition campaigner Marika Wagner says this is untenable for home produce gardens.

“It’s too long between drinks for many soft-leafed vegetables such as tomatoes, lettuces and spinach given there is a four-day hiatus between watering sessions,” she said.

Ms Wagner, who works at Bulleen Art and Garden, is supported by gardening presenter and author of Waterwise Gardening, Kevin Walsh, who said a level “E” should be introduced — for the elderly and edibles.

Mr Walsh said it was time to review the water restrictions, set at stage 3A until the middle of next year.

“It’s silly that people can top up swimming pools with a bucket yet you can’t use a bucket to keep your edible plants alive,” he said.

Steven Potts, chief executive of the Nursery and Garden Industry Victoria, backed Ms Wagner, saying that an industry survey earlier this year showed many Victorians grew their own vegetables.

“We’d support this, as for many people it’s a health issue to grow and eat their own food. It’s a good idea.”

Melbourne’s dams are below 40% capacity, and there is dissatisfaction about the Victorian Government’s management of water.

There is concern the Government picks on the most vulnerable in the community — including the elderly, many of whom have nurtured their gardens for decades — instead of dealing with large-scale recycling, outdated infrastructure, water lost through evaporation, leaky pipes, broken mains and metering errors.

Compared with the savings to be made in these areas, garden watering is marginal.

But Water Minister Tim Holding said there would be no concessions for vegetable plots. “Households can still water their vegetable garden twice a week and can use rain water (from tanks) and grey water at any time,” he told The Age.

Ms Wagner started the campaign after struggling last summer with her small vegetable patch in Brunswick, using water collected in the kitchen sink and elsewhere to supplement the twice-weekly rations.

“All I’m asking for is to be able to use a watering can on the off days; not for sprinklers or anything, that would be ridiculous,” she said.

http://baag.com.au

You can sign the online version of the petitions at www.gopetition.com

Dealing with stage 3 water restrictions so early in the season, and faced with even tougher ones in the coming months, I am reminded of a cartoon that had a huge impact on me as a child.

It was about a little girl, stuck indoors on a wet day, gazing out the window and wishing that the rain would go away forever. In true cartoon fashion, she got her wish. The rain stopped, and so did the water that had always gushed freely out of her tap. She gasped in panic as she squeezed the last few drops into a glass and was about to drink it when she noticed a flower outside, wilting in the sun, ready to keel over. She raced to rescue the flower but before she got there she tripped and the last of the precious water spilt, instantly being absorbed and evaporated by the thirsty earth.

Recently Sharon Beder, writing in The Age, pointed out the inherent unfairness of using ability to pay as an indicator of water-worthiness, but I wonder whether uniform and severe restrictions on everyone across the State — regardless of situation, type of outdoor usage or needs — is any more fair, or a better solution.

Gardens mean different things to different people. People in suburbs rich in parks and public spaces, for instance, may have less psychological, spiritual or therapeutic need for that little patch of daily-tended greenery.

And while someone who works long hours outside the home will probably feel the loss of their garden less than someone home all day with young children or with a disability, they are much more likely to be able to afford equipment to help bypass the restrictions. Automatic tap timers and watering systems, outdoor lighting so you can water late at night (hard to do in the country when your garden is pitch dark by 8 pm), tanks, pumps, and greywater storage systems all cost money, and often aren’t options for people who rent, or easily affordable to those who live on small incomes. (Not to mention high fences that might keep the occasional violation from the eyes of prying neighbours.)

Indeed, restricting outside usage of water seems to have been chosen not because watering your garden is in itself, or is necessarily, the most wanton use of water in our society at present, but simply because it is the only one that can be cheaply policed (by eliciting a charming and community building, deeply Australian, dob in your neighbours system).

Certainly, stopping all outside usage of water in private homes — which has happened already in some country areas, and is rumoured to be scheduled for introduction to most others by November — is a useful shock tactic to make us take water seriously, and may even help get us through this summer without running out. But is this kind of blanket prohibition useful in assisting us to make the type of changes required if we are to get through every summer from now on?

I’m all for telling people to give up their exotics and summer annuals, choose water-efficient and hardy plants, allow their lawns to die off and their gardens to be naturally browner and more muted. But even natives in a harsh season may need the occasional squirt to stay alive. And even well-mulched vegies need to be watered more often than twice a week.

Instead of encouraging people to garden differently, the restrictions this year seem to be encouraging people to abandon the idea of having a garden at all, and in the current climate, I’m not sure this is a good thing.

The significance of backyard gardens for greener, cleaner, more temperate cities and towns, and their function in harbouring and feeding the surprising amount of native wildlife that still lives amongst us is being increasingly recognised.

The bottlebrush in my garden that is still finding its feet in clay soil is not a luxury to the birds that feed from it, nor is the tiny pond a luxury to my local frog population. We could save a bit of water if we abandon these, but maybe in the long run we’d use even more water producing extra chemicals to control the insects that proliferate in their absence.

Biodiversity and the successful multi-use of small spaces takes time and care to establish, and often a judicious use of water to maintain. And I’d be hard pressed to believe that the salad that comes directly from my garden onto my plate uses as much water as the lettuce I drive to the supermarket to buy, produced as it is in large monocultural batches and watered by aerial spray or irrigation.

Indeed, when eighty percent of a nation’s fruit crop can be wiped out overnight by a bad frost or extreme weather event, is this really a good time to actively discourage people from tending their backyard fruit trees and vegie patches? Could we instead perhaps educate and encourage each other towards permaculture and water efficiency by more diverse and varied restrictions?

Gardening is also becoming an important tool in educating children towards good nutritional habits through the experience of growing and cooking their own food. Stephanie Alexander’s project at Collingwood, as described in her recent book, is just one example that it would be a pity to see halted.

For the girl in the cartoon from my childhood, the wilting flower was a life that needed to be saved. Her dilemma, how best to use those last few precious drops of water, seems to me to strike at the heart of what is happening for us.

In the contemporary world, we make choices every day, countless times over and over, about what is valuable, what is precious, what should live and what should be allowed to die, even when we don’t realise that we are doing this. For every choice we make about what and how we consume has effects.

Whether it’s choosing to sacrifice the two-hundred year old redgums on the Murray that are dying because we choose to wear water-greedy cotton instead of hemp, or a rainforest in another country so we can eat cheap beef burgers, or our own forests so we can toss away the paper carton the burger comes in, or the plants in our backyard and the creatures that feed on them so we can have long showers and keep our hair squeaky clean.

The water authorities have decided that commercial practices are to continue unrestricted, but that gardens – and the beauty, peace, wildlife, healing and food they bring – are a luxury we can do without. But like the little girl in the cartoon, I’m not so sure.

email your feedback or comments

Some useful links:
(thanks to those who sent these in)

Regarding the use of veggie gardens in schools to teach children about nutrition: http://www.theage.com.au/news/epicure/children-learning-as-they-grow/2006/10/02/1159641238776.html

Teachers for Forests website has a great page of links about water politics and policies: http://www.teachers.forests.org.au/waternatnews.html

Permablitz
www.permablitz.net

Eat the Suburbs! website
www.eatthesuburbs.org

Energy Bulletin
www.energybulletin.net

Len’s Gardening Page – lots of advice and info on permaculture and organic gardening
http://www.gardenlen.com/

Centre For Research and Education in Environmental Strategies (CERES)
www.ceres.org.au

David Holmgren’s article, ‘Garden Agriculture: A revolution in. efficient water use’
http://www.holmgren.com.au/DLFiles/PDFs/WaterJournalOpWeb.pdf

and a great description of ‘Luscious Lane‘, a communal garden in the inner city Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, sent in by Glenda Lindsay

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Beth Spencer is an essayist, writer of fiction, and radio producer. Check out www.DogMedia.com.au and www.BethSpencer.com

An edited version of this piece was published in The Age, Opinion, 19th October 2006 as ‘Healthy gardens are just the start for a healthy community’

David Holmgren recently estimated that for the amount of water used in the production of milk products per dollar value on his property was around 1/300th that of commercial agriculture (those figures from memory).