2022 Spring Home and Garden

Page 30 2022 Spring Home and Garden LINCOLN DAILY NEWS April / May 2022 2022 Spring Home and Garden LINCOLN DAILY NEWS April / May 2022 Page 31 B ottled water is one of the best selling, highest profit items at grocery stores. Cases of water are heavy, clumsy, expensive and the refuse pollutes the planet with plastic. Yet, it would probably shock you to know that most brands of bottled water are just filtered tap water from somewhere, often from city water supplies. The bottle and the cap often cost more than the water in the bottle. Is bottled water good for you? The answer is it may be better for you than the water that comes out of your home tap. What if you could improve the quality and taste of your own tap water, avoid the cost, the hassle, and all those annoying bottles that are clogging the landfills and lost a sea recycling with plastic? In this primer on drinking water we survey some of the different water treatments systems to produce tasty, safe water for drinking in your own home. Before you begin to improve the quality of your drinking water, it is a good idea to bring a sample of your water to your local health department where they can determine if your drinking water is safe. Taking a sample of your drinking water to a place like Culligan can give you further information about the various contaminates in your drinking water, and you can get professional recommendations for treatment. Whether you have your own well or are on a public water system (city water), the best investment to improve water quality is a whole house filter. The filter is installed on your main the hassle and the expense Ditch the water bottles, CONTINUED u for everyone. However, if you feel inclined to do so, consider this, buying plants for a flower garden like Smith’s would cost about $2,000 a year. He grows his plants from seed for a fraction of that amount. He also harvests seeds from the plants he grows and saves them for seeding the next spring, which saves him a lot of money and allows him to know exactly what he’s getting when that seed grows. But that is a story for another day. So, if you are interested in giving this a try, what would Smith tell you? Start small, be ready to invest a little bit of money that first year, and be ready to spend some time taking care of your plants. And, most importantly, if you enjoy it, keep it up, if you don’t then let it go. Smith loves to garden, has time to do it, and enjoys the visits he gets from folks during the summer, so for him the value of doing it himself has much less to do with money and much more to do with personal satisfaction. Perhaps that is why he’s so good at it. [Nila Smith]