On 10/22/2016 12:09 PM, songbird wrote:
T wrote:
songbird wrote:
the collection of reservoirs i watch last year
was around 6-7 million acre feet of water about this
time. this year it is close to 12maf. the reservoirs
that were close to sucking air that were real concerns
were Folsom and McClure, both are doing ok this year.

i hope they get plenty of snow this winter on the
mountains.

It rained for three days last week here in
Northern Nevada, so CA should have got
a bunch. The mountains (Sierras) now have
snow on them. And it is 75F outside today.

they got some for sure as i saw for the first
time in a long time positive inflows to some
of the reservoirs.

i hope you are setting up contours to capture
and hold as much rainfall as you can, putting in
rainbarrels, or even if it is filling buckets
from the downspouts off the roof it is better
than nothing.

the major principles in arid gardening are
wind-breaks, midday shading if you have to,
mulching and capturing water as high up as
possible on the property, stop, slow and spread
to get it all to soak in. if your house has
a basement make sure you are not capturing it
in such a way as to increase your foundation
drains/sump pump costs. yet if you are pumping
water that way it certainly makes a lot of
sense to pay a little more and pump it up as
high as you can into a large tank.

if you can get a tank to store water in up
high enough that can also be a nice source of
water for garden irrigation or possibly even
micro-hydropower. nowadays with LED lighting
you can light up a house for not many watts
(for us here most nights if Ma is not sewing
we can light the whole place enough with 10-15
watts).


songbird


Hi Songbird,

That stuff is a future thing. I have very little spare
time.

There is not enough rain to justify a rain barrel.

No one out here has basements.

I try to make my holes and beds slightly lower than
the surrounding surface so that water will drain into
them. And it did. The big bed I am making for
my onions took three days to drain after our whole
1/2 inch of rain stopped. (Pretty hard ground for
it not to soak in. It only went about two inches down
when I got to shoveling again.)

And the peat moss is to hole water.

With the drought, we have been seeing around 3 inches
per year for about the last five years or so.

-T