I'm Erik Helen with Landscape Garden Centers. This week we are discussing water conservation, which is very, very important to all of us. When you're doing a landscape, it's very important to make sure you have water going in the right directions. Then, also take care of the water that you're allowed to use for watering your lawn or watering your garden.
The biggest thing to remember about the use of water is that when you have really good soil, it's really easy to conserve and make the best use of your water. If your soil is very rich in organic matter, well-drained, you won’t lose water. The water's not going to just drain off and go down to some creek or ditch. When you don't have good soil then really look at those areas that are not well-drained and see how you can improve them, or create a drainage area to where the water can go, so it's not washing away. What we always say is when you have a nice rain, and you know that you didn't lose a drop of it because it was just such a steady rainfall, all of it went into the ground, that is the best kind of rain. Unfortunately, we can never, ever count on those.
So, there's many ways that you can conserve water. We'll have rain barrels which will collect the rain that's coming off a downspout. We'll actually create dry creek beds that's off of a landscape and we'll divert all the water to the one side that goes down the creek bed. Then, it's being held in a pond or another water feature. Basically, they're called water collection systems. Some of them are above ground, like a rain barrel, and some of them are below ground, and they'll be considerable sizes. These are becoming very, very popular. And the expense is at the beginning of it, but they're very easy to manage, because all of your water gets collected into the base, basically a cistern type system. Then it’s pumped out at whatever period of rate or time period that you want to have it to be used again.
We'll divert water away from houses, so we don't have water in the basements. But, we'll divert the water into these drainage areas that might go into a bog garden, a rain garden, or they might just be held in a pond that's just going to slowly drain out over a period of time.
When water is moving slowly, it does not erode, and that is one of the big concerns about putting all of this water into our river system. We do not want to be moving silt from one part of town at a rapid rate all the way through the city to take down to the river, because that all ends up, as we know it, farther downstream. What we want to do is try to slow that rate of water down, and make sure it's not doing any damage as we do that.
So, the biggest thing about conservation is making sure that your own house is very safe from water getting penetration. The other thing is making sure that your downspouts are not eroding out a big area. Putting splash blocks on rain spouts will help divert the water and kind of spread it out. Home owners should also take time and really observe where the water goes after a good rain storm.
When you're conserving water, irrigation systems pop into mind. Irrigation systems are typically running an irrigation system on a particular schedule. Make sure that rain sensors are installed, so then that way if it is raining, the irrigation system is disconnected while it's wet, or when it has rained. These are all required by city of Sioux Falls. They're very, very easy to install. It makes sense, because it saves you money and also saves water. If you are using a typical sprinkler head, make sure that those are set to where they're not watering a hard surface, or a hard pavement. Designs of irrigation systems are meant to be just for the turf or the plants area. When they're designed correctly there should be very, very little runoff, and so when you have good soil and you have a proper irrigation set up you should not have any runoff, and therefore you'll have to water less because all of your water is staying on the site.