Beverly Hoffman

The organization Hands Across the Sand celebrates our life-giving ocean water and joins with sponsors such as Sierra Club, Audubon and the Ocean Conservancy to keep the ocean as renewable as possible. As they gather each June and join hands on beaches across the world, activists create a line in the sand, a metaphor that there is a limit, a breaking point, where contamination can't be reversed. Their mission is to champion clean water and coastal wildlife.

As gardeners, we, too, realize the importance of water, how it gives life to our plants. I use it as sparingly as possible, but when a plant is being established, I know I must supply water generously.

Water conservation is a big priority at our home. We save water that comes off our roof by adjusting a downspout into water saver barrels as well as into huge plastic garbage bins. From the harvested water, we fill our 5-gallon buckets and carry them into the garden, which, of course, helps us build strong bones by weight training. During our dry summer months, we can irrigate almost exclusively with water we've accumulated from earlier spring rains.

I was impressed with a video clip where I saw people in India's Golden Desert who have harvested rainwater for centuries from the mere 9 inches they receive a year and which sustains the people in the entire area. They can't rely on wells or solar pumps because their groundwater is saline and undrinkable. Anupam Mishra, the speaker, talks about how the desert people honor the water they gather from community reservoirs, some of which are artistic structures, and are careful never to spit or spill anything into the water. It is their gold, their thirst-quenching gem that sustains them.

In our society we take water for granted, except in an emergency such as Hurricane Katrina where it took five days to get water to the people in the Super Dome in Houston. Sometimes I fear future wars will be fought over water. Michael Pritchard, a British water-treatment expert, was disturbed when he watched television images of people in the twin tragedies of the Asian tsunami and Katrina fighting for water, and he vowed to find a solution to shipping water to devastated areas.

He created a Lifesaver bottle, with a nonchemical nano-filtration capable of blocking viruses. It has an automatic shut-off system when it's ineffective and can transform 6,000 liters of contaminated water to crystal-clear drinkable water. He sees the Lifesaver bottle as a solution not only in natural disasters but also for the world, where every several minutes 13,000 thousand people get diarrhea and four children die from drinking water from contaminated water sources. In his TED talk (www.TED.org and then type in Michael Pritchard), Pritchard suggests that we all need to think in new ways to solve not only our immediate problems but to solve world problems.

When planting at our home, my husband, Marty, goes to the new planting spot with two water buckets in hand. He digs a hole larger than the diameter of the plant and then pours water from one of the buckets into the hole and sloshes the water and soil together, making a slurry. Then the plant goes in, and he fashions a moat around the plant, much like we did as children when we arranged our mashed potatoes on our plate into a well so the steaming gravy could pool in the center. Then, after he's tamped down the soil, he uses the water from the other bucket to pour it into the walled well so it slowly can soak down into the soil and provide moisture so the plant cuddles into its new surrounding rather than experiencing a shock.

Almost all of our plants have a dirt wall around them so that when we water, the liquid drips down to the plant rather than spreading and sliding across the dirt or penetrating so surfacey that the plant receives little sustenance.

I'm the one who continues the watering until the plant is established. A good rule of thumb is to water every day the first week something is planted. Then three times the second and third weeks. Then taper off to once a month. Because we mulch so much, we rarely need to water established plants unless we have a series of extremely hot days.

Water is a precious commodity. We each have the ability to draw our line in the sand of how we use our water. When we over-fertilize plants, some of the nitrogen-rich compounds flow into our waterways and cause eutrophication, a depletion of oxygen in our oceans. By using the most efficient use of water - like soaker hoses and by watering deeply rather than by surface sprinkling, we choose to protect our Mother Earth, our greatest garden.

Montaigne said, "Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do."



Beverly Hoffman can be reached at columnists@sequimgazette.com.