While you Northern Hemispherians are feeling the cold down here in Australia are frying our butts off. Not only our butts, our poor gardens are suffering horribly.
The summer battle to save our patches of grass (so dismal they can’t really be classed as lawns) is not a new thing either as this article from 1930 reminded me. In it they suggest the use of waste water from the house to keep your most special plants alive which is something most of us Aussies are not strangers to!
This post was prompted by a comment conversation with Meeks the other day when I described the lengths I had gone to in order to get the water coming out of my washing machines grey-water hose closer to the dried up patch of grass-like substance near the washing line.
Usually I just run the hose (actually two 10 metre hoses joined together) out of the back door, off the verandah and onto the lower level of grass nearer the house.
This year my efforts have really paid off as that part of that garden has stayed green(-ish) regardless of the hot dry weather we have suffered through lately.
As you can see by the photos below, the part which gets the water from every load of washing I do has managed to resist drying out completely, whereas the other part can barely be described as grass (these two photos were taken only ten steps apart).

Grey water grass.
The upper level of grass though, well, that takes a much bigger effort to get the water to and I had use a bit of imagination to get the water there without making my washing machine pump the water up a flight of steps and blowing it up!
It looked ridiculous but I passed the hose out of the back door, through the verandah rail, through the branches of a tree fern and into the Grevillea nearby, through the handle of the Weber (kettle bbq), tied to the kids totem tennis, over the wheelbarrow and under two bricks to keep the tension in the hose.
Amazingly this ridiculous contraption worked and as you can see the grass there has taken on a (very) slight tinge of green.

Crunchy grass…
Who would have thought a few cheap lengths of plastic hose and garden friendly laundry liquid could turn out to be the most important pieces of gardening equipment I own!