I made two mosaics of my garden, neither tells the full story but together they give you an idea.
Ballarat is on Stage 4 water restrictions and has been for a long time. This means No garden watering at all EVER ! No car washing except for windscreens and headlights and it must be done with a bucket-not the garden hose.
1. The bucket in the wheel barrow - when it is full of water it is too heavy to lift so we wheel it out the back gate, round the corner and in the front gate to water the front yard. Every load of washing fills this large toy barrell twice (no matter what setting the machine is on). Gone are the days of popping on the washing and heading out. We then wheel it around and bucket it out. The soapier load onto the tough plants and the rinse load on the fragile ones.
2. Ahh, this is gorgeous. This is the washing machine hose coming out of the dryer vent
3. washing machine hose into bucket
4. Empty Terracotta pots - no more pretty flowers, we would rather keep the trees alive
5. Cobwebs on the hose. We are not allowed to use it at all.
6. Rain gauge - ha, haven't had to use that for a while.
7. Hose in the front yard - this hose carries all the shower / bath water (not that anyone has had a bath in looong time) to the front yard. Thats the lawn (ha) it is lying on.
8. Water container, used to collect water in the kitchen, when the water is running waiting to warm up.
9. This is where the dryer used to hang, and that's the hose going out the vent. Long complicated insurance type story there. You cannot have a window permanently open to accomodate this sort of thing or it voids your house insurance????? So we just pop it out the vent. Home beautiful or what?
10. The diverter from the shower / bath pipes so the water drips eventually into the front garden. Of course going from a big pipe into a tiny hose means almost no drainage, so the bath can take an hour to empty, leaving behind every tiny speck of dirt. ( we haven't used the bath for 6months or more)
11. Hose from diverter into front yard
12. Aha, this one didn't like washing machine water
13. Nor did his friend
14. More dead stuff
15. Thermometer
So at the moment my garden grows in spite of the heat and the drought and because we have become very very careful with our water.
and this is Barry, he holds 5,000 litres of water, he is about up to the second-from-bottom rung at the moment. 
Just waiting for some rain...........
