Meet Val. Val's the one-eyed Carlton supporter who owns the the blog domain carltonrules.blogspot.com and keeps me up to date with all things happening at Princes Park - and no, that's not a garden. Val is great fun and comments abundantly here on this blog and every other blog I find. Yet Val will often beaten me there.

A retired librarian who loves to create books, not write them - but create them (you will understand when you've spent some time on her blog). She spends her days camping, touring the world, exhorting the 'man who cooks' and writes a great post or two, or three or ....

To guest blog or not? At first I thought, nah, I don’t really concentrate on the garden in my blog, even less so now than before, what with the effects of the 10 year drought and all. However, I had recently thought I might post something in my own blog about the water harvesting devices hubby has installed, waiting until our 5000 litre tank was delivered (more than a month’s wait). But here was Stu, a blogger buddy, asking me to do a guest blog, and as he supports the same football team I do, how could I say no?

So 10 years of drought in Victoria, previously known as the Garden State. What does this mean to a city dweller not locked in daily battle with Mother Nature like country people are? Did I ever think I’d miss rain or feel overjoyed hearing rain on the roof? What about the intense interest in how full the reservoirs are? I would bet that many Melburnians could now give you the percentage of the current water storage in Victoria to within a few percentage points.

Here in the city we are currently on Stage 3 water restrictions which means, amongst other things, that there are only 2 days a week when we can water gardens (NOT lawns), between the hours of 6 – 8 a.m. and 8 -10 p.m. Drippers and handheld hoses or buckets only, no sprinklers.

When this was first announced, every man and his dog raced down to their local Hardware Heaven, otherwise known as Bunnings, to completely buy out the entire stock of drippers. Of course, buying them is one thing, installing them and/or converting from a sprinkler system is another.

Fortunately, my hubby has had quite a bit of experience at installing irrigation systems in the 3 gardens we’ve had over the years. He is sorry now he didn’t go for drippers years ago because with that system the plants get water directly to the root system, and it’s more efficient than spraying water around which is not only ill directed but can evaporate. He has noticed that some plants are very happy with drippers, despite the drought.

However, Stage 4 has been predicted for May, which means that there will be NO WATERING OF GARDENS as well as lawns. This refers to water from the tap, but now people are starting to think about the water that oh so occasionally falls from the sky onto the roof, flows down the downpipes and into the storm water system, lost to the land. How to trap that? The new buzz words around town are “water harvesting”, and amazingly quickly new products have appeared on the market that help capture water for the garden, and reuse elsewhere.

Overnight we have seen a whole industry develop, specialising in diverting the water from the downpipes off the roof, either directly onto the garden or into holding tanks. Here’s one of 3 installed at our place.

Then there’s the water from our washing machine, which is a water efficient front loader. The water goes from the laundry trough out to a place where hubby has intercepted it with a “kit” he bought. And there I thought he had cobbled it together himself! Those green twist ties are a bit amateurish looking but so far there have been no leaks.

And then there’s the latest trendy “must-have”: your very own tank for the serious water harvester. The suppliers have not been able to keep up with the demand. Hopefully we’ll have ours in 4 or 5 weeks. We’ll be putting it at the back of the carport, in a designer color to blend with the house. Here is a simulation of where the tank will go. It will be 5000 litres. Then we pray for rain.

There are other ideas to follow up, but of course we’re participating in the latest craze, the Shower Shuffle, where you capture water in a bucket while waiting for the water to warm up and while showering. Sorry, no photos.