Water economies

https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/eau/penurie-d-eau/plan-eau-cest-quoi-la-tarification-progressive-quemmanuel-macron-veut-generaliser-733532f6-cfa6-11ed-a10f-5958f611860a

I know many people discussed ways of NOT wasting water… and any good habits might soon be going to pay-off…

Reminder to self: I really must get a water-butt… or 2

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I have five and an underground water tank - still not enough! By the middle of last summer I was asking our gite guests to shower with 2 buckets in the shower tray and to throw the water onto the flowerpots on the terrace afterwards. After Easter I’ll be buying more very large flower pots and getting rid of all the small and medium sized ones in an attempt to make watering more efficient.

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Sadly, underground is impossible (solid rock).
Just been suggesting to OH that we can fill buckets via the shower and also via the basins (such a waste, sending coldwater down the drain while we wait for the hot to arrive)…
and then use the buckets of water to flush the toilets… :+1:

Current planted pots will be seriously checked-over to find best/drought resistant ones… the others will have to take their chances…

I find the small begonias are wonderfully drought tolerant - surprisingly - much more so than geraniums and the like.

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Our best water source was unhooking washing machine and not using washing power but just washing balls and a hint of savon de marseille. Got 70 litres a time. Not for veg garden, but kept everything else alive.

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We are lucky as being a farm we have two big wells that used to be used for water cannons and a natural spring going into one of the marshland paddocks, we needed to pump water from the well in the orchard for the pond or we would have lost all our fish and the mayor asked us to pump extra into the river as the main fish lakes further downstream were really suffering, we put a weir gate in to drain some of the water off the marshland into the river as well.

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We lost all our fish last year despite massive effort, thousands of them. It was heartbreaking. Now have a green pond as no fish.

The chateau had big problems with their big lake as well, even the moats almost dried up, he lost his three fish ponds as well.


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Come back to the UK, it has been raining and raining and raining!

Let me think about that…Eeee NO.

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Please water all your trees and plants

:woman_elf:t2:

I wish! I’ve planted over 100 trees in our field in recent years. No way was there enough water for them - they HAD to cope. My view was this is our new world and whatever survives will be a part of it. I can’t mollycoddle (where on earth does that come from?) them. We only had enough for the pots round the gite and on our veranda - even then it was only by using shower water.

What are washing balls?

And so sorry Jane to hear about your fish - what an awful thing to have happen.

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These things.

We managed to put about 50 pf our largest fish in a neighbour’s lake, and stocked another 50 in a 1000l cuve. And hauled about 500 litre a day from fountain 1km away to keep an area of the pond that we had dug and lined for another 25 or so, and change water in the cuve. But still had to pick about 1500 dead smaller ones and tiddlers out of the mud.

Sadly when it rained and we put our saved fish back in they all died too. We were gutted. Plus totally knackered shoulders hauling water!

I still can’t go down to that area of the garden.

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Oh Jane! That is so sad.

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I hope the government is also looking into the vast amounts of water being wasted though faulty mains network infrastructure.
Also looks into agricultural needs for the future and types of food we can grow without pumping so much water on them.
I too, am one of the lucky ones, don’t have a well, but have a citerne, linked by under ground tunnels and holding caverns across the village (built during the Middle Ages up until the 18 hundreds) fed by rain water in the cellar. When I get round to it I’ll put in a pressure pump & tank and then plumb in the toilets, washing machine etc.
At the moment only used for watering the gardens and washing the cars.

Which, rather than being channelled into reservoirs, is just flushing untreated sewage into the rivers :rage:

Yes, certainly round here they are trialing different tree species and have trial lots of different crops.

My bug bear is that they are not controlling cow numbers, which need a huge amount of water.

Think about that vegetarians :blush:

M Macron did present a major plan… which includes mending leaks and improving the percentage of waste-water re-used … etc etc… as well as changes to agricultural/industrial water thingies…

@JaneJones how awful and grim in spite of all your efforts :cry:

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