Having never owned a house or really had a yard of my own, I got pretty excited and decided to do some ad-hoc landscaping. Built some raised beds for vegetables, and just laying in some organic shaped in-ground beds for low water decorative plants. Gonna fill the rest in with gravel. Any pointers?
Oh boy - it's a rabbit hole. As much as I like to blame capitalism for things, this one kind of stems earlier than that. Water rights and usage in the Western US is pretty fucked, and it's only going to get worse with climate change.
I have some hot takes after reading Cadillac Desert and some other books on water rights. I'm going to lazily link to another comment where I wrote a tiny bit about this book. What's fun is lots of river water allocations in the Western US were written in times of excess and aren't even remotely accurate for normal times let alone times of drought. The Colorado River has only flowed through to the Pacific Ocean like once in decades (citation needed) and Mexico doesn't even get their allotted share. It's mouth to the Pacific is mostly a dry bed of dirt ๐ซ .
My house is in the watershed of the South Platte River, so Nebraska is the one who'd get mad if I put out a 3rd 55gal drum rain barrel. There's a fun 100 year old compact that says Nebraska is allowed to seize land to build a canal to take their full allocation - a couple years ago Nebraska started to threaten to inact on their rights and Colorado's just like 'good fuckin luck'
We're closer to playing out Mad Max in my lifetime than I'd like. Sorry to bring down the vibe in Gardening ๐