Re: [gardeners] heat wave broken!
margaret lauterbach (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Tue, 03 Aug 1999 07:38:07 -0600
<snip> We're expecting a county-wide
>water shut-off, and I'd like to preserve whatever I can glean.
>
>Of course, at 2:00 o'clock, the underground flower beds get watered
>by soakers. Only what I heard certainly wasn't any ordinary soaker~!
>It was Niagara Falls.... Dear Jimmie had tossed a hose down the
>cellar stairs -- and it just happened to be the full water supply for the
>veggie garden, wide open! Ye gods! I ran around into the house, and
>yes, sure, the cellar was under water <sob>.... Put an old fashioned
>hand wringer on the tubs, and four beach towels on the floor, and
>went to work.
>
>But that wasn't all... I turned on the zone for the entire front of the
>house
>because a section of shrubbery at the left side of the front door looked
>very unhappy. And of all the dumb things to have let happen, it seems
>that when we transplanted two wonderful rhododendron bushes I had
>been growing, we pinched back the underground hose with a 5" hairpin,
>to get it out of the way, and of course, cut off the available water from
>that
>point onwards, completely! In this heat and drought, that 6x6 section
>never got any water for 4 weeks! Last night you would have died
>laughing at the sight of me, not knowing WHY everything looked so
>peaked, as I carried gallon Clorox jugs outside full of plain, room temp
>water, and dumped each one on top of a plant... ! There are 3 rhodies,
>5 Delaware Valley white azaleas, 5 dwarf hinoki cyprus, and a cut-leaf
>Japanese maple.... that made 14 trips back in to the kitchen!
>
>Once the water supply officially gets restricted, the system is to allow
>us to water anything except the lawn which we can manage with a
>sprinkling can. 1st offense if caught : $1,000.00 fine. The neighboring
>county edict already is in effect... We had 6 tenths of one inch of
>rain
>during July.
>
><Sigh....> Penny, NY
Penny, could you have used your cellar as a giant rain barrel? Would have
been easier than cleaning it up. Could your pinched water line have
anything to do with the rhodies you recently lost? Margaret L