Episode: WA Garden Gurus Special - Summer Gardens
Presenter: Adrian Beattie

Perth is just immerging from its warmest and driest winter on record and you would have to go back to 1940 to find a year that was nearly as bad. All of which is bad news for the Water Corporation, especially when you realise that just 1% of all that the water that comes into our homes is used for drinking and cooking. 50% we put onto the garden.

Professor Jorg Imberger, Director of the Centre for Water Research, says us garden lovers shouldn?t despair because there is a great waterwise answer;

We have had this waterwise programme which has focused on things like the shower, the toilet and tanks. If you look at the numbers, they are insignificant as the total amount of water used in a shower in the south west is about 10 gigalitres, but if you look at the garden it uses about 200 gigalitres.

An easy way to half that number is to go from sprinkler irrigation to dripper irrigation. It is roughly $5 a square metre if you make that change of which you get a $1 rebate from the government, so the cost if you are doing it new is roughly the same as sprinkler irrigation.

If Perth did that as a whole we would be saving two desalination plants.

Is there anything new build housing can do to help address this issue?

With new build housing you have even more options; you can for instance separate the grey water from the normal water, which they are already doing very effectively in Queensland. You can introduce the dripper irrigation systems, separate the storm water better and make soak wells. There is an awful lot of flexibility.

In Queensland, the best subdivisions are using only 30% of what the other ones are, with absolutely no constraint to the householder.

So do you think we can hang onto our gardens?

I think we should hang on to our gardens because there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn?t.

Centre for Water Research
http://www.cwr.uwa.edu.au/

Waterwise Rebate Program
http://portal.water.wa.gov.au/portal/page/portal/dow