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?
Water rights in Colorado are wild. Our state is relatively arid and just coming out of a long term drought, yet has the headwaters for many of the nation's major rivers; overusage here can have an outsized impact on downstream states.
A lot of these measures are responses to falling water levels and climate change. Every state on the Colorado river is party to a federally-negotiated water sharing agreement, which means we're always at some level of water rationing. You would think they'd strictly target bigger agricultural operations, golf courses, and the like, but... here we are.