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Why my parents made me shower with a bucket when I went home for the holidays

Flying home to Los Angeles from New York every year for the holidays has its perks. LA boasts copious amounts of space, sun, and produce — a luxurious respite from the dark, cramped corners of NYC.

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But there's one thing that definitely isn't flowing in abundance in LA: Water.

Which is why, when I returned to my childhood bedroom for the holidays, I found an empty bucket in the shower.

Shower bucket
Julia Calderone/Tech Insider

It's not there to collect drippings from a leaky faucet. It's there to capture clean water while I'm showering. Then I can haul the brimming bucket downstairs and out to the garden to toss onto my parents' carrots, jalapeños, and cherry tomatoes.

It's like a shower beer, but with a bucket.

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The shower bucket is just one of many strategies my parents employ to conserve water. In case you haven't heard, California is in the throes of a serious drought. About 80% of the state is severely parched. Even the pending rains of El Niño won't be enough to end the drought any time soon.

This is a result of years of lower-than-normal snow and rainfall, which has slowly been diminishing the state's reservoirs.

Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range — which supplies California with more than 60% of its water — is the lowest it's ever been in the past 500 years. You can see how dramatically the snowpack has diminished in the past five years alone with this photograph NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite took from space.

Sierra Nevada snowpack comparison_an
Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada's has dramatically declined between 2010 and 2015.
NASA/MODIS

This is why the shower bucket is so vital.

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I didn't know this, but my parents have been using the bucket method for about 10 years, long before Gov. Jerry Brown issued mandatory water restrictions across the state for the first time earlier this year in April.

While I know it's for a good cause and I'm always happy to conserve water, I can't imagine doing this every single day of my life.

For one, the bucket sits right beneath the faucet at my feet, so during my shower I'm constantly nervous that I'm going to get shampoo or soap in the bucket water, which wouldn't be good to feed the veggies.

The bucket is also flimsy. When it's filled to the brim — full of about 5 gallons of water — it's heavy and unwieldy. No matter how careful I am, I end up splashing water all over the floor as I precariously lug it down the stairs and out to the backyard.

"It's a pain in the neck," my mom told me. "But it's just something we have to do."

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It also takes time.

"The thing about it is that it takes pre-planning. You always have to make sure you have two empty buckets up there," my mom said. "Then sometimes you forget and you're ready to take a shower, but you don't have any empty bucket so you have to put your clothes back on and go downstairs and empty the bucket."

The shower bucket isn't the only water-saving technique my parents use around the house.

When they bought their large compost bin from the city about 20 years ago, they also purchased a giant rain barrel that, in theory, would collect a bunch of rain water to use in the garden.

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"We had that one for a long time, but we got so little rain that it never had a chance to fill up," my mom said. A rain barrel is only useful if — you know — it rains.

They also keep an empty basin in the sink to collect excess water after rinsing vegetables. They rarely use a hose to wash things outside — like their cars, the side of the house, or the patio. Instead, they use the trusty bucket.

They've also made their backyard more drought-friendly. They replaced much of their grass with gravel. Then they replaced any remaining grass with drought-tolerant grass called St. Augustine, which goes dormant in the winter and doesn't need to be watered as much. They do have a pool, but turns out that pools don't waste as much water as people think.

IMG_0732.JPG
Julia Calderone/Tech Insider

They also planted drought-tolerant plants and installed a drip system instead of sprinklers for the Creeping Fig in the backyard, which requires little water.

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When they do use the sprinklers, they only water for as long as the city lets them: three days per week for no more than eight minutes per day, all between the hours of 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. — during times it's cooler to decrease evaporation.

They even throw their dog's old water onto the plants before they replace it with fresh water.

These strategies, including the shower bucket, aren't new. They're also not only specific to my parents or California. In fact, my parents are lucky that they have flowing water at all — some taps in the California's central valley are literally running dry.

For me, the shower bucket is an annoying inconvenience, as I've been spoiled with NYC's restrictionless flow of water. But for them, it's a lifestyle.

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"We've always done this in our shower," my mom said. "I hate waste. To me it was a shame that we were letting water go right down the drain."

California
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