“I love the rain,” the Encinitas woman said as she walked through her backyard. “Anytime it rains I get excited about my plants.”
Robin Reid-Anderson has dedicated years to creating a backyard that’s sustainable in San Diego’s dry Mediterranean environment.
San Diego Top Stories
“We landscaped this and put in all drought-tolerant plants because of the cost of water,” Reid-Anderson said.
Get San Diego local news, weather forecasts, sports and lifestyle stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC San Diego newsletters.
Reid-Anderson backyard enterprise includes four 50-gallon plastic rain barrels, also known as cisterns, that were quickly replenished during San Diego’s winter storms
“The big rains that we had; they were filled in a day,” Reid-Anderson said with a smile.
Reid-Anderson got her rain barrels — and learned how to use them correctly — from the Solana Center in Encinitas where Jennifer Galey is an environmental educator.
Galey said just 1 inch of rain on a 1,000 square foot roof can net someone 600 gallons of free water. That’s a big financial savings, considering that more than half of a water bill can be used watering a yard.
“I adamantly make it so that no rain leaves my property,” Galey said, laughing. “I don’t try to store it. I sink it in the ground and that will benefit me for months to come.”
Galey said that also reduces water pollution by preventing runoff from carrying trash, fertilizers and chemicals into storm drains and out to sea. It’s also fresh, clean water that doesn’t have any man-made chemicals added to the mix.
Galey said a lot of local water districts and the San Diego County Water Authority offer rebates to offset the cost of rain barrels.
