Thinking about Water Management

Have you ever stopped to think about the systems around you in your daily life and how they work? At any time just stopped and pondered what was around you?

One evening while walking your dog, or taking a cigarette break, or what ever it is that gets you out the front door on a typical week day evening, look at the houses in the neighborhood. Try to take yourself outside of the mindset where things have just always been this way. Look at your neighborhood from the viewpoint of a foreigner, or an ancestor that doesn't know what the suburbs are.

Does it make sense?

In the typical manufactured suburban neighborhood every third house has the same layout, and they are all placed facing which ever direction is towards the street. Every yard is the same, except for the occasional renter who doesn't want to mow, the grass two to three inches tall, not much else is growing except maybe some ornamental shrubs below the windows to hide the foundation, a couple of Bradford pears or perhaps a Silver Maple and maybe a few flowers along the walkway. Now look at a roof, and imagine it raining. After that rain lands on the roof what happens to it? where does it go? If you follow its path you will most likely find that from the roof it runs to a gutter and down a spout. From the spout it is ejected away from the foundation of the house to prevent foundation problems. The water lands somewhere in the yard where it quickly skirts itself right across the top of the lawn without anything standing in its way straight into the street. The water then makes its way Along the side of the street moving across the pavement much faster than in the grassy yard to the nearest storm drain or culvert where it meets up with the rest of the water of the city. And together it travels away to the nearest retention pond or natural waterway.

Does it make sense?

The day after the rain people come outside and when they normally would have turned on a sprinkler or watered the garden they can skip it because it rained the night before. They go about their daily business, come home, probably skip the watering again and go back to sleep. The next morning while headed out the door to work Joe Blow kicks on the timer to the sprinkler again. Susie Lunchbucket next door never seems to have time to turn on the sprinkler before work and really doesn't care that much anyway. After about a week Joe Blow's lawn is doing well, nice and green, the lines from the mower in the grass in perfect increments, edges nicely edged. He looks over at Susie's yard really wishing she would put as much time and effort into maintaining her yard as himself. Her grass is turning brown already, there are dandelions, dead nettle, and white clovers all over the place.

While Joe is busy working hard and stressing about the neighbor's dandelions spreading to his yard something else is going on somewhere else. The hundreds of thousands of gallons of water from the rain a week before are sitting, nice and cool beneath the canopy of giant Oaks, Hickories, and Sycamores. The water is slowly being absorbed into the earth, teaming up with the sun together they give life to a thousand acre valley fifty or so miles away from Suburbville. Everything is green, even more so than Joe Blow's yard. The water is being pumped up into the giant trees all around it, each one holding enough water to fill an average farm pond. They release it back into the air while at the same time producing a large quantity of nuts and fruits that would put your nearest Sam's Club or Cosco to shame. The valley is beautiful and productive, yet nobody works it. It supports itself in a continuous cycle that has always, since the beginning of the earth, been the most efficient assembly line ever known. And probably always will be. Meanwhile, Joe Blow is back home paying the city to pump potable water through his sprinkler after directing hundreds of gallons of perfectly good free water as far away from his house as possible just a week before.

According to the U.S. environmental protection agency The average American household uses 320 gallons of water per day, about 30 percent of which is devoted to outdoor uses. More than half of that outdoor water is used for watering lawns and gardens. Nationwide, landscape irrigation is estimated to account for nearly one-third of all residential water use, totaling nearly 9 billion gallons per day. EPA stats

Here is a picture of a suburban backyard in Missouri (above). The Tarp and pile of branches were just put there before this picture was taken. This is just another typical suburban yard, the backyard slopes down from where the house sits, there is a shed and a large porch, not much else. This picture was taken late winter so the grass is dormant. I, along with my wife and brother, had the opportunity to redesign this backyard. When I design or redesign any property the very first thing that goes through my head is water. Where is the water going now and where do we want it to go.

I usually start at the top, where the water does. All of that water gushing out of your gutter spout every time it rains can be caught and stored easily with the usage of small 55 galloon barrel or large thousand gallon water cistern. Directly underneath your water spouts are typically the highest point in a yard making it a prime location for transferring the water wherever you would like in your yard with the use of gravity. Now you are able to water your lawn and your garden with free water that isn't full of water treatment chemicals that can weaken the health and vitality of your plants.

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A typical Blue Rain barrel attached to the Spout

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The way a yard is designed it is not capable of absorbing large quantities of water simply because it doesn't have time to soak in. Our yards are smooth flat surfaces gently sloping away from the foundation of the house. The solution to this problem is as simple as the problem itself, slow the water down or hold it in so that it has time to soak in. This can be done in many ways but the two most common are the use of swales and ponds. A swale is a trench dug along a contour often with a berm on the downward side. So unlike a ditch, which carries water to different places, a swale holds it in place, catching any water shedding off of the ground above it. We placed both a Swale and a pond in this design. The swale is in the middle of the yard and the pond is at the bottom in the lowest part of the yard catching any overflow from the swale and water shed from below the swale. We placed ditches leading from the spouts to catch over flow from the rain barrels and send it to the swale.

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The Swale

The pond in the corner of the yard

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This is only The beginning stages of this design. There is much more that has been done that I will share about later , and still much more that hasn't been done. Designs Like this can take many seasons before their full potential is realized and if done well will end up being the most beautiful and productive landscape in the neighborhood.

I encourage everyone to stop and think about the systems around them, identify a problem, and come up with a potential solution whether its realistic or not. Just start to problem solve in your head, even if its just once a day.