Last year when I started my vegetable garden journey, I realized very quickly the amount of water you need to make the whole garden cooking project work.   Quite simply; vegetable gardens wont grow without an abundance of water.   After a few very hot days in late December, it dawned on me that perhaps growing vegetables in your garden in Australia was a dodgy thing to do especially when you need to water them everyday.   But I didn’t let that get the better of me, we had a water tank installed, like most properties in Melbourne.   Very quickly I got into the habit of watering our plants at night, as I believe, they have the greatest chance of absorbing the water before it evaporates by the sun. 
However, upon doing this from a water tank and hose, and although it is quite relaxing, it is difficult to establish just how much water each plant is getting and I think its quite an inefficient way of caring for your garden.   So we purchased a soaker hose and buried it just under the mulch layer in the vegetable garden.   The mistake we made was to then leave the soaker hose on over night, as we thought that the amount of water coming from the soaker hose could not possibly drain the tank over night.   But after a couple of nights in late December we quickly realized that our precious water storage had been reduced to a mere puddle!
For those of you who have a cold climate during these months I just paint a general climate picture for you.  

• November-December:  Normally hot and dry with the occasional shower, but not enough to fill your tank.  Temp range 24-30 degrees.
• January – February:   Very, very hot, windy and dry.   Rare it is that we have rain.  Temp ranges in this time 27-47 degrees.
• March-April:  Remaining hot but now may have some cooler temperatures,  and some showers.  Temp ranges 30-22 degrees.

So essentially what I had done was to completely empty our tank before I had even got my vegetables through the extremely hot and dry temperatures.   Consequently, with the hot days that followed last year, most of my garden failed because I just couldn’t protect it and I didnt‘ have the water to water it with. 
This year, however, its a slightly different story;  I have a full water tank, the soaker hose is primed, ready and buried underground but I yet to use the tank water.   I am saving it for those hotter months.  At the moment the vegetables are being watered in two ways:

1. To save the cold water out of the shower, into a bucket before it heats up;
2. Saving cold tea/coffee from my teapot & coffee percolator.  I keep a bucket in my kitchen that collects all of this wonderful organic matter as well as the cold water that would otherwise be wasted down the drain before heating up to do the dishes.

On average I have two extra buckets of water that get emptied on my garden at the end of the day.   And its not rocket science, just takes a little bit of commonsense and concern for our water storage and environment.   Would love to hear how you save water for your garden cooking in your home. 
Ny.

Technorati Tags: cooking, gardening, reduce water, Water saving

1.  Pantry analysis – cooking

The first is to do a thorough analysis of your pantry.  Go through the categories of meals and for this I like to use a simple excel spreadsheet which list the days of the week on the “X”axis and the meals you eat in your house, on the “Y” axis.  Then conduct your research noting down the meals you have over the week to two week period.    It is important to put here as many ingredients in each cell that you use per meal so that you can incorportate and utilise herbs as well as other main garden fruit and vegetables.    
Once this has been done you can then go over your spreadsheet with a highlighter and mark the repetitive ingredients.    The patten will emerge,  you will see things that have been used over that two week period over and over.   My suggestion is that these are the items you should begin planting in your garden with the goal of achieving impressive garden cooking.

Technorati Tags: cooking, fruit, garden, pantry, vegetables