Paul Simon: Hi! I am Paul Simon, Landscape Horticulturist and Landscape Architect with the National Gardening Association, and today we're talking about how to conserve water in your garden.

One of the first things we'll discuss is proper irrigation and alternative water sources. Here we'll discuss reviewing your existing irrigation systems, reviewing your irrigation controller, reviewing some of the irrigation heads in your yard, and we'll also look at alternative water sources such as storm-water recycling, rainwater harvesting. Next we'll talk about reducing lawn maintenance to conserve water use.

Here we'll talk about over-watering, we'll also discuss some simple techniques, that you can do like identifying your soil types, that will help you to understand grades of different water absorbency, we'll talk about watering early in the morning and watering when it's not too windy out. Finally we'll discuss some other techniques you can do to retain moisture and conserve water in your garden.

Some of the tools you might need to conserve water in your garden are, a trigger nozzle for your hose, some drip irrigation, an irrigation rain gauge, adjustable irrigation spray and rotary heads, a rain barrel. You also may want to adjust your mower height, so you can retain more moistening in your yard. And we'll discuss drought tolerant varieties that you can purchase for your garden.

Before we begin let me introduce myself, I'm a Landscape Horticulturist with the National Gardening Association. I've got 20 years of experience in landscape horticulture, landscape architecture and design. We were found in 1973, we are a non-profit leader and plant-based education with the mission to promote home, school, and community gardening as a means to renew and sustain the essential connections between people, plants, and the environments.

Did you know that there is just this much water in the world today as there was millions of years ago? Actually it's the same water. It's just been recycled through the hydrologic cycle. So what's the big deal about water conservation when we have just this much water as we had in the past?

Well, good clean water is a very precious commodity, and some regions of the world it's a very scarce commodity. In this series we'll discuss some of the steps that you can take to conserve water at home, and the benefits of conserving water. So let's get started.