(Fair Use) http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24701018-5000117,00.html
Linda Barrow
November 25, 2008 12:00am
LYING on the chiropractor's table the other day, I got to thinking about how life has changed around Bendigo after many years of harsh water restrictions.
For a start, there's the monthly visit to try to get my poor bucket-carrying skeleton back into some sort of shape for another four weeks of bailing out the bath and pouring it on to the plants in the most distress.
Living with water restrictions can be a real pain in the back.
Tim Holding says Melbourne people are using an average of 165 litres per head per day now, and that will rise to about 180 litres in summer.
For country people, that's best measured as a whopping 20 buckets a day. And I have to think: what? Every day?
To those of us living in northern Victoria, this seems like a massive amount.
If you'll excuse the pun, Melbourne people should just suck it up and get on with living in their environment.
On a rough calculation, we use about 90 litres a day per head in our house, of which about 70 are recycled back on to the garden. In some towns, even that sounds like a luxury.
Many country people visiting friends and family in Melbourne say they find the green lawns and nature strips almost bizarre and a source of deep annoyance, we have become so used to tight restrictions.
Here, a green nature strip is cause for suspicion. It's amazing how many Bendigo homes have little signs out the front proclaiming their struggling patches of green are served by recycled water or tank water. Not to do so risks being dobbed in.
We are now under a modified stage 4, and have been for a couple of years. It allows us to dribble some water on the garden for one hour twice a week. To us, even that's a bit of a luxury, for the summers before that all outdoor water use was banned.
Chiropractic work boomed in Bendigo then.
The truth is, learning to live in a dry climate with harsh restrictions does have some satisfactions. We have a large garden on a hill in the centre of town.
When we bought it eight years ago, it was surrounded by three-quarters of an acre of beautiful English-style gardens and what seemed about 4000km of polypipe watering system.
Oh, it was a treat: turn on the timer and tap and the place turned into a Bendigo version of Waterworld.
That lasted about one year.
The rains failed. The dams dried up and in came the restrictions.
After two years, the polypipe became nothing more than a nuisance.
The dogs began ripping it up and chewing it. Spiders and beetles moved in. But we did what thousands of others are doing around regional Australia.
We began transforming our garden into a dry climate place.
Each year we uproot another few hundred metres of polypipe, chop it up and put it in the bin.
It's nearly all gone now.
Each year we rip out the things which did not survive (the silver birches died on Dry Year One) and propagate the survivors.
It takes work and discipline and we are watching with enormous interest as our garden gradually becomes one my nana would recognise.
It has old roses, lavender, geraniums, pelargoniums, succulents, rock features, gravel paths and lots of mulch.
The tragic thing is that when you walk around some of the older areas of Bendigo, it is clear some home owners have lost all heart.
Their homes sit like boxes in bland rectangles of dead grass and desiccated dirt.
Others have spread gravel where lawns used to be.
One neighbour has even put down that bright green plastic turf.
We have saved the trees by re-using grey water and we are increasingly proud of what the garden is becoming.
We actually think our 13,000 litre rain tank is quite sculptural and the vegies it allows us to grow are delicious.
The grey-water hose poking out the laundry window is a Bendigo badge of honour. At present we're allowed to water our gardens for one hour, twice a week, which makes us a lot luckier than some other parts of northern Victoria.
I'm not sure if I would ever want to return to the days when we would be allowed to splosh 155 litres of water around every day, like Melburnians.
Or to be able to use the hose for two hours twice a week.
It would seem sinful.
Although I wouldn't miss the Bucketer's Back.
Linda Barrow is Bendigo-based writer and gardener
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