The weather has been pretty hot this week, and if the weather-guesser is halfway accurate it’s set to get hotter through the weekend. It’s great to be outside and in the countryside with weather like this, but as I look at the vegetable garden, it does rather focus the mind on water.
All living things need water, and quite a large proportion of their mass is composed of water, and yet, there is comparatively little water on this small planet of ours. True, three quarters of the Earths surface is covered in water, but slightly more than 97% of it contains salt! This leaves slightly less than 3% which could be considered fresh water. Most of that is not easily accessible, as it’s frozen in places like the polar ice caps!
Now, you can go for sometime without food. It might not be comfortable, admittedly, but you can go for some time. Not so with Water. If you don’t get water you dehydrate quickly, and ultimately you die.
Given the growing population, which has an absolute requirement to hydrate itself, and the need to grow food for itself (which also requires water), I’m surprised no one has taken action to preserve some of that water in the polar cap so that it doesn’t just melt into the oceans and become salty! I don’t mean stop the icecaps from melting, because that’s just nature doing its thing, but if they are going to melt, shouldn’t we be capturing some of that most valuable liquid!?
Anyway, enough of the “big picture” problems…act on the things within your immediate control first.
If you’re growing some of your own food, and you don’t have a water butt, or method of capturing rainwater, then I suggest you move that to the top of your “to do” list. It’s amazing how much rainwater you can capture off a relatively small roof of a shed or garage, but if you can, why not use one of the many kits you can buy to capture the rainwater that falls on your house? After all, having it hit your roof, travel down to the guttering, and then into the sewer is such a waste, when you can intercept as much of it as you can and use it for free in your garden. Believe me your plants will prefer it to mains tap water (if you do have to use tap water to water your plants, let it stand in buckets or watering cans for a day or so before using it if you can).
Don’t forget your own water needs either! I remember as a kid when the local water company told us the tap water was not safe to drink for 24hrs, we struggled a little as there was not so much bottled water around as there is today. Similarly, those people severely affected by the flooding a few years ago had water problems of a different kind. In some areas the amount of flood water caused the sewers to back up, contaminating the drinking water. The authorities responded by placing water bowsers on the streets, however some fool decided it would be fun to urinate in them! (I don’t know if they were ever caught but I sincerely hope they were!) The morale of this story is to maybe be prepared with a contingency plan in case your water supply is compromised. Bottled water that you store, then use and replace periodically would be a sensible preparation.
Water. The most precious of liquids.
