“Turbid” is a word that has been used far more than usual ’round the South Coast of British Columbia (Canada) lately. Those of us who live in Vancouver, North Vancouver and Burnaby are now well into our second week of not being able to drink the water that runs out of our taps due to some pretty remarkable winter storms. Our municipal water is typically not filtered and the storms messed with our water table/reservoirs and deposited all kinds of brown silt into the water supply. So far, with the exception of one test that they haven’t been able to backup, the water seems to be safe, but really brown and cloudy. The official word is: don’t drink it.

What does this have to do with gardening? Well as any gardener knows water is a big part of sustaining life on earth. And trust me, after more than a week of boiling kettles of water for cooking/toothbrushing/etc and taking a daily bath in pretty murky stuff, making the connection between water and foliage life, and water and animal/human life is pretty easy. As a gardener, I typically find myself thinking about things like rain barrels and water saving in the summer when we have our rare dry spells here on the coast, and yet with all the constant talk of water quality and a scarcity of good drinking water lately I’ve been feeling a bit embarassed about how elementary my current water conservation efforts are. Pretty much every radio show lately (I’m a big CBC Radio 1 listener myself) has had folks calling in to talk about how they’re dealing with the lack of fresh tap water. And while there have been reports of all kinds of consumer nuttiness like fist fights at Costco and grocery stores limiting bottled water purchases per customer, there has also been this awesome stream (forgive the pun) of folks phoning in to share all the water conservation tips they typically use that make relying on “fresh” tap water for all their water needs moot to begin with. I’ve now heard several old gals tell tales of year round rain barrels that they use for all kinds of purposes including: cooking, cleaning, laundry and hair washing to name a few. Each of them had different methods for collecting the water and ensuring it was safe to use. All involved boiling at one point and then several different methods for basic filtration and decanting. A few claimed to only ever drink rain water as they don’t like the taste of the chlorine that is in our municipal water. My head still buzzes with talk of acid rain from childhood, so I’m not sure how clean rain water actually is, but at the sametime I agree wholeheartedly on the chlorine front (that stuff really can’t be good for you), and as I say I really admired their approaches to water. Most of these women identified themselves as not having grown up in Canada and not having been raised with the idea that water is free and clean and runs out of your tap, so they’ve always adopted these alternative approaches to the wet stuff. Each of them professed that the processes they used weren’t really all that time consuming and that we should really have a more conservationist approach to water all the time, not just when what comes out of our taps is well, as they say around here: turbid.

I’ve found all their stories very inspirational, to the point that I’ve moved “set up rainbarrel” off the Spring “to-do” list as a gardening-only related project and plan to get something up and running during the rainy season to see how we might start making better use of it year round.