It’s been hot. It’s been dry. How are your plants doing? Do you have a sprinkler system? Do you think your plants would survive without it?

I was hired last year to hand water a new planting of native plants in front of our LEED Silver standard police station. The plantings qualify for LEED’s Outdoor Water Use Reduction credit, specifically the ‘No Irrigation Required’ option, which requires showing the landscape can survive without a permanent irrigation system beyond a two-year establishment period.

In practice, that means someone has to keep new plantings alive using a hose for up to two years before they’re established. During the summer months, I run two hoses full blast for about an hour and a half, 1-2x per week, likely in the range of 1-2000 gallons per visit. Will they be okay without water next year? We’ll see.

On my own property, I capture and water my garden with rainwater. I have five thousand gallons of cistern capacity, piped from my roof via downspouts into 3 buried tanks, pumped out through a drip irrigation system. This has drought-proofed my garden while also increasing biomass, without any town water. Each inch of rain on 1,000 square feet of roof yields 620 gallons of free water.

We talk about wasting water, but often forget about rain, which we can also waste by sending it down storm drains and out to sea, without giving it the chance to recharge the soil.

Retrofitting for rainwater capture is expensive; designing it into new construction can be surprisingly cheap. Our own setup cost roughly the same as the code-required stormwater tank — though it’s not technically code-compliant, so we needed special town approval.

I wear many hats, but engineer is not one. Some back-of-napkin math suggests a similar approach at a project like the new high school could mean free water within about ten years — then, in perpetuity, an environmentally friendly source of water for sports field irrigation and emergency backup that wouldn’t touch town supply. The challenge: incremental costs would need to be financed up front.

We’re going to keep having building projects in town, and we’re going to keep having droughts. We’ve been pretty spoiled with easy access to water for decades, but that system is only going to be as good as predictable rainfall and heat, and careful management of the Quabbin watershed. When it all works well, it’s miraculous. But miraculous and resilient aren’t the same thing.

Rachel Summers

Board Member, Lexington Climate Action Network (LexCAN)

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