Spend $3 and save 100 gallons of water. Seriously.

    Here on the homestead we are in full on harvest mode for lettuce, arugula, radishes, and now pak choi as well. A funny thing about home grown produce is that it is dirty. As in it came from the soil mere moments ago, and it still has dirt on it. Most of the produce you get at the store has either been rinsed or thoroughly washed. It's up to you to wash your homegrown produce.
     For leafy greens the best way that I have found to wash them is to harvest in a large batch and fill the sink up with water then put in your harvest and gently agitate a few times. The dirt settles to the bottom and you pick out the greens and drain them in a colander. So the past few weeks I have been shuttling back and forth from the kitchen sink to the front yard garden with a big bowl, scooping all that water from the sink and taking it out to water the plants. Then yesterday it hit me.

A DISHPAN!
     Yes the humble dishpan was the solution to shuttling back and forth hauling bowls of water. It also turns out it is a great all around solution for saving water.

A dishpan is the perfect vessel for washing fresh veggies and collecting the water for reuse! Image of United Solutions dishpan from Amazon.com

     I had previously purchased several of these for some experiments growing aquatic vegetables so I knew I could get them for cheap at Dollar General or Big Lots. I buy the 18 qt. version made by United Solutions. Locally our Big Lots has the white version for 2.50 and Dollar General has the black version for 3 dollars. I prefer the black for use in the kitchen so I stopped by DG yesterday to pick one up since I knew I was going to be harvesting a lot this weekend.

Dishpan on the first run washing lettuce harvest

    It just so happens this dishpan fits like a glove into our very standard double bowl sink so I suspect it will work well in most sinks. I was able to wash all my lettuce using the soak and agitate method, then I used the water to wash some bok choi and radishes before taking all that water out watering the kale. You can save water according to how much you need to wash vegetables. The brilliance of this is that one can reasonably expect that people who more frequently wash vegetables are also growing them and thus more frequently can use the water for irrigation.

     Think about it, how often have you rinsed a tomato or a cucumber and let those couple seconds of water just flow down the drain? So what I did after my harvest washing marathon was just to leave the dishpan in the sink. Any time we just need a quick rinse for some veggies the pan is there to collect the excess. If we have to wash some mundane foodstuff off of our hands (got some honey on my hands from a vinaigrette for example) those couple seconds of water go into the dishpan. Anytime we need to use soap or are washing off meat or dairy, we do that in the other sink bowl. You will be amazed at how much water you can collect by not letting the water just drain away. 

      So there you have it, for $3 and a small behavior change you can easily save on the order of 100 gallons of water a year. Total disclosure, the 100 gallons is just a reasonable estimation that I came to after using this and thinking about the behavior change. I'll try and update this with hard numbers after some time in use. Obviously the more you have to wash veggies the more you will save. There is no need to break out the garden hose to water your plans when you would let so much water run down the sink too. 

     Whatever your angle, frugal, cheapskate, or environmentalist this is a super easy system to implement to maximize the usefulness you get from your water.