Mulch, mulch, mulch.

this is a great time of year to pick up free sacked-up leaves. I know I'm planning some bag pick-ups. In Dec. you can often pick up mulched Christmas trees--great stuff & smells so wonderful.

Now that it's cooler I need to get another load or two of horse manure & lots of leaves. Where I dumped leaves last year there is actual humus & lots of worms (I'm in the desert)

Mulch, and check your irrigation system.

Our system has 6 controllers which have 6 stations each. We check all of them when we turn it on in March. However, whenever I get a substantially larger water bill, my immediate assumption is that we have a leak somewhere.

That just happened, and we checked, and sure enough, we had two leaks - one in a soaker hose which is now buried under spreading ground cover daisies, and is not very visible. The other one I discovered yesterday morning. It is not even part of our automatic irrigation system - it was the top part of a standing hose bib which is attached to a hose and two soaker hoses. It is turned on manually, and then a timer turns it off. Where the timer attached to the other parts was spraying out water - I heard it as I was going out to get the morning paper (we suspect the deer which have been visiting us had something to do with it).

Our water company will refund excess charges if you can prove by pictures and repair bills that you really did have a leak and fixed it.

Jackie

Yeah, me too. I know my water usage was less this season because it was much wetter over all and I deliberately cut back on watering and my bill was still higher! Our rates went up again.