29 Jan
It rained today – not a lot, but a relief nonetheless.
This more normal winter weather didn’t come soon enough to send the right message to my poor, confused Douglas irises (Iris douglasiana). I planted these native wildflowers about a year ago, and the appearance of their first blossoms is bringing me some happiness. That’s despite the fact that it’s the middle of winter, and they really shouldn’t be flowering until spring is well under way.
23 Jan
We’ve had beautiful, clear, sunny – and sometimes startlingly warm – weather here for essentially the entire fall and winter to date. Only about an inch of rain has fallen since Levon & I put up my new rainwater tank over a month ago. Last year was officially declared the driest in over 100 years of record-keeping for the state of California, and the long-term forecast calls for little relief for the rest of what should be the rainy season. Some Humboldt County residents, normally pallid and desperate for sun by this point in the season, are actually starting to pray for rain.
It has been interesting, actually, to talk to local folks about the weather. As the season grinds on, fewer and fewer are happy about it, smiling and talking about how lovely it is. More and more immediately comment on the strangeness of it, or speculate about how dire the situation may become for our fishes, our farmers, our trees. There’s a catastrophic feeling in the hushed voices. A couple of my friends, however, are stoically trying to smile their way through it. You can’t change the weather, they say, so you might as while enjoy it while it’s here. That seems like a good attitude to me. Except, of course, that one of the most dramatic scientific revelations of the last century is that we are changing the weather, and on a global scale – even if we can’t control it on a day-to-day basis. And that’s something we dare not forget.
In my own little backyard world, the winter garden has fared remarkably well so far. The soil I’ve been lucky to inherit (and have the responsibility to improve) is already so rich in organic matter that even with the sun, these short winter days have done little to suck the moisture out. I haven’t watered for several months, but under half an inch of soil, there’s still plenty of moisture. As the days grow longer, however, I hate to contemplate the amount of water I’ll have to use later in the spring, if the rain stays away.
The sunny days are good for at least one thing, though: gathering signatures to get an initiative petition on the ballot. That, and related political activities, have been taking a lot of my time lately (which also helps explain my low level of posting on this blog).
15 Dec
Winter is the rainy season around here. At least, it’s supposed to be. Historically, by this time of year, rains starting in October would have totaled 10 or 12 inches by now. This year, we’ve hardly had 2 inches. Add that to a dry season last winter, and it’s looking to me like an increasingly serious drought.
Anyway, I’ve been taking the opportunity of the mostly dry days in the last month or so to prepare for the rain I know (or hope) will come eventually. I’ve agonized over rainwater collection strategies since we first moved here, trying to figure out how to collect the huge volumes of rain that (usually) fall on our house and garage roofs each winter, store it, and move it (slightly uphill) out to the vegetable and grain beds out back. Every potential solution I’ve come up with has required lots of time, lots of energy, and lots of money – in other words, projects which will have to wait for another day.
I finally decided that the best thing to do in the short term is to try a few smaller, more manageable projects that get at the issue in different ways, and see how they work. I’m thinking about it as a modular, incremental approach: If I can collect, store and use some water successfully with a modestly sized project now, then in the future, maybe I can repeat the project with variations, or expand it to collect more water. With that in mind, I took on two projects: (1) a small pond to directly collect rain as it falls from the sky; (2) a 300-gallon tank to collect rainwater from a portion of the house roof.
The pond is located far from the house and garage, on the far side of the vegetable beds and orchard, near the western edge of our property. This puts it at almost the highest elevation on the property. The slope of the land is so slight that it’s barely noticeable, but it’s enough that the water knows it’s there! My idea was to place a water collection feature in a location where I could use gravity to feed the water to vegetable beds or perennials. Here’s what it looked like shortly after my friend Levon and I dug it:
It’s circular, about 12 feet in diameter. Most of it is very shallow, with the exception of a slightly deeper depression in the center. The plan is to use a hand-operated siphon pump to get the water over the berm which contains it, then let gravity move it down a length of hose to quickly soak whatever I want to water at the end. Because the slope of the land is so slight, the pond couldn’t be very deep, or most of the water would end up below the level of most of the vegetable beds and the siphon wouldn’t work! The deeper portion in the center I will leave full year-round, hopefully attracting some frogs and other water-loving wildlife to the garm.
Because my soil is sandy and fast-draining, the pond had to be lined with a plastic liner. This is a potential impediment to scaling up surface water storage – which should be the cheapest, easiest and most practical method of water storage in this cool, foggy climate – both because I don’t like the idea of spreading all that plastic around, and because pond liners are really expensive! In any case, I took the plunge this time. I covered the liner with some old, moldy burlap which Levon had lying around, and sprinkled some straw and oat seed over that. Protecting the exposed liner from the sun should extend its life substantially, and the burlap and straw will rot, the oats sprout, and hopefully jump start some good microbial activity in the pond. I still have to figure out if there’s a good way to aerate the water and avoid a stinky, anaerobic, “bad” microbe situation.
With Levon’s help, the pond was dug and liner laid in only a few hours. The other project turned out to be a bit more ambitious. The idea here was to place an elevated water tank just outside the back door of the house, use it to collect rainwater from the gutter, and have it gravity-feed directly into a tub or sink for washing vegetables from the garm. To date, we have been washing our veggies in a utility sink in the laundry room/mud room (just inside the back door), but that ends up washing a huge amount of dirt and organic matter down the drain and into the sewer system, and uses quite a lot of city water. With the new project, we can use rainwater to wash veggies, and then collect the dirty water in buckets placed under the sink drain and use it to water our plants again! (I’m even thinking about using that water to refill the pond when it’s not at capacity.)
It’s a good thing that Levon and I agreed to a work trade recently (helping each other out with projects on an hour-for-hour basis) and that he is such a patient teacher of the many practical skills he has and I don’t, such as carpentry and plumbing. Without him, I would never have been able to successfully complete this project. But with his help, and after many iterations of the original plan, three work days, and seemingly endless trips to hardware and plumbing stores, I now have a beautiful system in place that exceeds any expectations I originally had for it. Even with the free labor, it ended up being a much more expensive project than I had anticipated, but I’m happy with the result, and with what I learned in the process.
Before the Water Tank Project
After Water Tank Project
The tube hanging from the gutter is a “first flush” device. At the beginning of any rain event, the first couple of gallons to come off the roof and through the gutter pour directly into the tubing. Hidden inside is a floating plastic ball, which seals off the chamber when it fills with water. That causes the water to then flow through another pipe (which is directly behind the first flush device and thus invisible in the picture) into the tank. This mechanism is designed to keep the “first flush” of rainwater, which is likely to contain contaminants which have settled on the roof since the last rain, out of the storage tank. At the bottom of the device is a small valve which slowly releases the collected water, drop by drop, after the rain, so it doesn’t even have to be emptied by hand!
The deck is made out of redwood, which seemed to be the best option for lengthening its life out in the elements without using chemically treated lumber. We made it as strong as we could (300 gallons of water weighs 2500 pounds!) and attached some large chunks of wood around the tank in an attempt to discourage it from “walking” off the deck and falling into the side of the house during a large earthquake.
Directly to the right of the tank in the picture, by the back door, you can see the sink. A bucket is set underneath the open drain. It’s a perfect vegetable-washing situation.
Now all we need is rain!
12 Dec
The last week has brought unusually cold weather to our usually mild coastal area. Typically, we see a few hard frosts every winter. In the last 9 days or so, we’ve seen a hard frost every night. On several days, the frost never melted in the parts of our yard that stay mostly in the shade at this time of year. One morning, we even got some precipitation that could charitably be called snow!
Snow in Front Yard
This is the first winter that we’ve made a substantial attempt at winter vegetable crops, but all of them seem to be holding up well – even the lettuce just has a few brown edges. The Brussels sprouts look calm and majestic with frost on their shoulders, and the scallions and overwintering onions seem like they haven’t even noticed there’s a chill in the air; the frost barely settled on them. The carrots laid their leaves down on the ground, but otherwise stayed green and alert and seem no worse for wear.
Brussels Sprouts & Scallions in the Frost
Carrots in the Frost
I was also interested to see that the perennial shrubs and trees generated enough heat to keep the ice crystals away. So none of the plants seem to be suffering much, but I’d still be happy to see 10F warmer temperatures and a big rain storm – a typical coastal Humboldt winter!
30 Sep
Down on the garm, fall marches on. Two early autumn rainstorms in the last two weeks have left the ground soaking and the last crops curing out in the field – winter squash and a few sad sunflowers – dripping. I raised the winter squash on straw and cinderblocks before the rain to prevent rot, and they seem no worse for wear, but I’m hoping for a week or two of sun to finish ripening them. Meanwhile, well over a hundred pounds of squash – red kuri, butternut, and sweet meat – already sit in the pantry, waiting for winter meals to come. The younger plants already in the ground for winter, spring or summer harvest – lettuce, mustard, arugula, spinach, scallions, carrots, onions, brussels sprouts, broccoli – are all more than happy with the newly arrived dampness (except for the slug activity that comes with it).
Meanwhile, fall is also apple season. Apple trees are ubiquitous around here, and many of them sit in residential backyards and barely get picked, most of their yearly produce rotting or consumed by birds. Over the summer, I resolved to acquire the necessary tools and make a few connections, and gather and process large quantities of apples this fall. That venture wasn’t going so well until about a month ago, when I had two fortuitous encounters one after the other. First, I mentioned my ideas to a friend of mine, Marlon, and he mentioned that there’s an enormous, 100-year-old apple tree outside his house that produces more fruit each year than he can handle. After some further discussion, we decided to get together to process, press and can various apple products, pooling our resources and knowledge.
A few days later, we discovered that another friend of ours had a fruit press! He does not, however, have a crusher, which is necessary to process hard fruit like apples before pressing. I offered to obtain a crusher, giving us together a full complement of tools for apple pressing, which we could share as necessary during the season. He agreed!
So it was that last Saturday I headed over to Marlon’s place with a crusher, a press, and various pieces of canning equipment. Marlon had never canned before, and neither of us had ever crushed or pressed apples. Everything went more or less smoothly, though, and we worked out a lot of the kinks in our system as we went. Watching the juice pour and trickle out of the press, tasting the undeniably robust yet delicately sweet appley-ness of the fresh-pressed juice – it was a euphoric revelation.
After about 12 hours of labor, we ended up with 7 or 8 gallons of canned applesauce and a similar quantity of juice, both of which we split. Here’s the portion I took home that night:
The 6-gallon bucket is full of pomace – the solids left over from pressing – of which I took a portion home for another experiment. To get more out of each pound of apples, it’s possible to re-soak the pomace in water for a few days and then strain, leaving a lighter cider which can be either consumed directly or fermented. My plan is to reduce a portion of it to a sweeter syrup, then add it back to the rest and ferment the whole bunch for what I hope will be a tasty hard cider.
Pomace
Marlon and I were so impressed with our apple juice, and with the enormous quantity of apples still on his tree, that we decided to re-convene soon for another day-long pressing session. My goal is to press enough not only for drinking through the winter, but also to boil some down for “boiled cider” or “apple molasses,” a sweet, shelf-stable syrup that can be used as a sweetener in place of honey or sugar. It’s yet another of my ventures into the realm of home-produced sweeteners. (Sugar beet harvesting and processing is slated to take place soon.)
downonthegarm 