All posts by Owen Dell

The Incredibly Stupid Water Thing

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I’m not going to mention any names, but there’s a town in San Diego County that just did an incredibly stupid thing. Towns do stupid things all the time, of course, but for sheer obliviousness this one really stands out. Some time back a developer with a plan for developing a blighted property in the middle of this town began construction on his community-friendly, mixed-use, LEED-blessed, low carb, high fiber building.

Part of the plan was an underground parking garage that would keep quite a few cars off the street. After he had excavated about 30 feet down he hit ground water. Turns out there’s a perched water table under most of the town and under much of the neighboring town as well. It’s been there forever and has caused problems all over the area ever since people began building things there. Water leaks out of the cliffs and causes them to collapse. Water undermines buildings. Water fills basements. Water deteriorates pavement.

Still, the water, for all the problems it creates, is fresh and clean, as testing proved when the developer first hatched his Bright Idea.

The Bright Idea was to incorporate a cistern into the building and start using the water for flushing toilets, watering the landscaping, and other uses. He figured everybody would win with this approach: he’d have a ready supply of fresh, local, wholesome water for his needs, two communities would have a long-standing problem mitigated at no cost to the taxpayers, and neighboring property owners wouldn’t have to worry about their buildings collapsing into sinkholes. Oh, and the area is under a Level Two Drought Alert with up to 20 percent mandatory conservation, so it’s not like they can’t use the water.

Mr. Developer went to the City with his Bright Idea and they wiped the smile off his face in a hurry. “Sorry,” they said, “there’s no place on our forms for that kind of thing. You’re going to have to forget it. Oh, and you had better figure out someplace to get rid of all that water you’re going to have to pump out of your parking garage.” Long story short, he sucked over 26 acre feet of water out of the ground and spilled it, with the blessing of the City, onto a local beach. He’s still pumping and dumping water today, and will be for the life of the building. In the midst of a drought, with water in short supply, in a community that gets a little over 10 inches of rain in an average year and has had recent annual rainfall as low as under 3 inches, in a community that is suffering with no end in sight, the authorities chose to insist on throwing away water. No doubt there are other city officials in the same building who are working day and night to encourage citizens to conserve water. Go figure. 



Wonderful, Rotten Compost: An Introduction

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WHAT’S COMPOST?

Compost is nothing more than plant parts broken down by microorganisms into stuff that looks like soil. It’s the most natural, and the most common, recycling program on earth and it’s happening in your yard right now whether you do anything about it or not. In fact, here’s a case where benign neglect is half the battle. By allowing leaves to remain where they fall, you mimic nature’s own composting system whereby the leaves (called “duff” in a natural system) decay in place and the nutrients are returned directly to the plant in a perfect, elegant little loop. Nature doesn’t need you for this. Go back to your hammock.

 

THE DUMB WAY

Compare this with the really dumb conventional practice of raking everything up on Saturday morning, putting it in trash bags and sending it to the landfill. You’ve gotta ask, “Why are people doing this?” The truth is, they don’t know. Their fathers did it and their fathers’ fathers and so on, and without questioning they, too, take rake in hand as dutiful suburban homeowners and repeat this folly of middle-class wastefulness. See, that stuff is a resource, not a waste material. Where are you taking it?? It’s organic fertilizer waiting to go to work! When you throw it away and then have to bring in, at considerable expense, inferior nutrients in the form of chemical fertilizers, you’ve created several problems at once — the waste of a resource, the effort of removing it, the cost of disposing of it, the impact on landfills, the expense and effort of buying and applying fertilizer, the damage done to plants and soils by the harsh, salt-laden elements in the fertilizer and the loss of natural mulch on the soil surface. You’ve gone to a lot of work to make things worse.

 

So perhaps you could write this down and tape it to the wall in your toolshed, or maybe have it engraved into the handle of your leaf rake:

 

LEAVE THE LEAVES!

 

(Why do you think they CALL them leaves??)

That way, when guilt finally drives you out into the yard, the last thing you’ll be tempted to do is destroy the automatic composting system that’s under your shrubbery.

 

SOME EXCEPTIONS

FIRE: Many people live in areas where wildfire is a concern. Naturally, the more dry stuff you have laying around when a fire comes, the greater risk that your house will burn down. Even if that doesn’t happen, the leaf litter will burn up under the plants and kill them by toasting off the bark; not a happy scenario. If you’re at a high risk for fire, keep leaf litter down to a minimum. Rake it up and use it to feed your compost pile, which is described below.

DISEASE: Certain diseases are made worse by allowing litter to collect under plants. For instance, Camellia petal blight is commoner when the fallen flower parts are allowed to remain on the ground. Some fruit tree and rose diseases are also spread this way. If you have susceptible plants, first ask yourself why, and remove them if you can’t come up with a good answer. If you decide they should stay, resign yourself to the constant chore of cleaning up after them.

VERMIN: People talk about how rats and other filthy creatures live in mulch, but I have never seen any evidence that this is actually true. I think it’s another urban myth that’s been passed along from generation to generation like the alligators in the sewers. The only critters I know of that like natural duff are beneficial ones — earthworms, soil bacteria, sowbugs and other members of the Leaf Reincarnation System.

 

BEYOND DUFF: TAKING CHARGE OF YOUR ROTTING FOLIAGE

What most people think of when they hear the word “compost” is a pile or bin of steaming yard waste out behind the garage. It conjures up images of long days spent turning it over and over with a rusty, hand-blistering pitchfork, watering it with gallons of sweat, being chased by clouds of irate fruit-flies and ending up with a puny pile of brown dirt that looks no different than something you could have swept up off the driveway.

 

WHY COMPOST? Compost seems like an act of penance, a virtuous undertaking whose reward may only come in another life. Compost seems like a sacred practice of the lost tribes, something “real” gardeners do, in private and for mysterious reasons only they understand and are sworn on penalty of death never to tell the rest of us. So why would the average gardener ever want to compost?

 

IT’S NEEDED ELSEWHERE. Sometimes the valuable nutrients and microorganisms that are tied up in compost are needed elsewhere in the yard: a newly-planted flowerbed for instance, or the veggie garden. Even lawns benefit from compost. In fact, by manufacturing and spreading compost in your yard, you greatly reduce the need for fertilizing, and your plants will respond miraculously to being composted. I have seen many plants come back from the nearly-dead within a few weeks after an application of compost over the root zone and a couple of good waterings. You know what those “real” gardeners say? They say, “You can never have too much compost.” They say this with great feeling and a sense of wistfulness because no gardener has ever even had enough compost. Like sex and money, we imagine that others are getting more than we are.

 

THE GREENWASTE LOOP. Even in the best-planned yard, there comes a time when there’s just too much foliage of one kind or another to leave laying around. When the hedges get trimmed, when the leaves drop in the fall, when the lawn gets mowed — all these events and more produce sudden pulses of biomass into the system. Since these cannot be ignored, and since it’s no longer acceptable to send them to the landfill, the compost pile serves a basic need. Composting keeps green material (too bad it’s been given the unfortunate name “greenwaste”) within the system of your yard by breaking it down into a usable form.

 

Composting will help you be a lazier gardener because it solves so many problems at once. Instead of hauling waste out and fertilizer in, you make and spread compost. Instead of nursing sickly plants that are suffering from a lack of decent nutrients, you enjoy the beauty of healthy plants that are more resistant to pests and diseases.

 

how hard is this going to be?

“OK, I’m convinced. I’ll compost, I’ll compost already!” you say, “But how hard is this going to be? I don’t know if I can do this.” Relax. Composting is a lot easier than you think. Imagine something that you make in less than an hour, then mostly ignore for a few weeks, then spend less than an hour with to harvest the end product. Isn’t that easier than what you’re doing now?

 

Perhaps you’ve read complex “recipes” for compost, involving exact percentages of different materials, compost starter inoculants, special herbs gathered by tribal virgins, ram’s horns passed over the pile by the light of the full moon, dust of alabaster, eye of newt and all that. Well, I’ve read those recipes, too, and met the wild-eyed zealots who advocate their use. Maybe they work, maybe they don’t. Personally, I would advise you to forget them. Stuff rots. If you follow a few basic principles, the stuff rots somewhat faster. That’s it. OK? Let’s do it, then…

 

A COMPOST PROJECT:

Ingredients:

50% green stuff (lawn clippings, fresh leaves, etc.)

50% brown stuff (wood chips, branches, decrepit lawn furniture)

0% animal products (meat, fat, chili con carne, fish heads, dear departed Aunt Millie)

pitchfork

shredder-grinder or chipper (optional)

compost enclosure or manufactured composter (optional)

 

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. CHOP IT UP. Make stuff smaller by shredding or chipping. Shredding is what you do with leaves; you use a shredder-grinder. Chipping is what you do with branches; you use a chipper and then visit the chiropractor the next day to have him stop your entire upper body from twitching uncontrollably. Your goal is to beat the material up as much as you can and make it as small as you can. This increases the surface area to make it more accessible to the microbes that are going to do the real work. In my own garden, I chop everything up into tiny pieces with my pruning shears. This is less work than it sounds like; I just stand there snipping away until it’s a trash can full of little pieces of my yard. It’s more peaceful than using a noisy machine and the pruning shears are cheaper and easier to maintain than the machine and they don’t burn gasoline and pollute the air like the machine. Plus I have an awesome right wrist. Want to arm-wrestle?

 

2. PICK A SPOT. Find a place that’s out of the way, since compost piles aren’t usually all that good-looking. If you do have any friends who are real gardeners, they will admire your compost pile (you might want to invite them over now and then just so this will happen). Others will ignore it or look alarmed as they pass by, as if you had just audibly broken wind. If you choose a shady location, then the pile won’t dry out as quickly and you’ll be able to work in the shade when the time comes to harvest the material. You can even compost over an area where you’re planning to plant a garden; you’ll have a head start on fertility that way because nutrients from the compost will leach out into the soil below.

 

3. PILE IT UP. You don’t need a fancy compost tumbler or bin. Do that if you want to. A pile is fine. Now, one thing that’s going to happen as soon as you make the pile is heat. The pile will heat up and you want that to happen. Heating is the first stage of the process, and starting temperatures inside the pile should reach around 140-150 degrees in order to kill as many weed seeds and pathogens as possible. If your pile is too small, it won’t heat properly. If it’s too big, it may overheat. The ideal size is 3 x 3 feet up to 5 feet tall by 8 feet long and wide.

 

Mix about half green material and half brown material. You can add a bit of soil, or manure or organic nitrogen fertilizer to speed the process up a bit. Don’t bother with the compost inoculants (also called “starters”) that are sold in nurseries and catalogs; all the bacteria you need for compost are already in your raw materials. Some people layer their materials, others mix them together. Be careful not to allow layers of grass clippings to form, as they’ll rot and smell really unforgettably bad, rather than quietly composting as you want them to. Also, don’t include weeds that have gone to seed, because many seeds remain viable despite the heat of the process, and so you’ll just spread them back into the yard later. Kitchen scraps are fine, but no meat, OK? No meat, no fat. Compost piles are vegetarians. Animals will eat the meat long before it ever has a chance to break down.

 

By the way, if your pile is open to the outside world, and if you don’t turn it regularly, mice and rats will come to live in it. This is not so good. So either make sure your bin is completely enclosed or turn your pile every few days. Keep in mind that mice and rats can get through even very teeny openings. I’ve been told that a rat can dislocate the major bones in its body, kind of like taking a snap-together model plastic skeleton apart, push them through a half-inch diameter hole one-by-one, and easily enter the forbidden lair of, in this case, your composting operation. Kind of gives me the creeps. My otherwise impenetrable recycled plastic bins are open at the bottom; I wrapped the bottoms with aviary wire, which is like chicken wire but with ½ inch diameter holes that the critters can’t pass through. I’ve had no intruders since then.

 

When your pile’s made, water it down real well to get things going. Covering it with a tarp helps hold the heat and moisture in.

 

Now go away and let the pile do your work for you.

 

4. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? The pile will begin to heat right away. Maybe steam will come off it for a couple of days. Keep it moist during this stage, and maybe turn it once or twice. Have fun pushing your hand inside (you can’t resist) to marvel at the amount of heat generated. (Be careful, though. It can be hot enough in the center to really burn you.)

 

After a while, the pile will cool down and you’ll notice how much smaller it has gotten. That’s the signal that the intense period is over and a long process of breakdown and curing has begun. If you turn the pile often, you could have ready compost in as little as a month. But what’s the rush? Lazy yards should have lazy compost. Turn it now and then if you think of it, and definitely keep it moist. Pull back the outer layer once in a while to see how the center’s doing. After a few months, you’ll find a big heap of delicious brown material inside, ready to be harvested.

 

5. GATHERING THE COMPOST. Perfectionists sift the finished compost before using it. It’s not a bad idea, especially if you’re incorporating it into the soil. There are always chunks of undecomposed material in the mix and they can be awkward to work with. But it’s perfectly OK to simply shovel the compost up and haul it away to be used. If you do sift, use an old nursery flat, the kind they sell ground covers in, as a sifter. It’s free.

 

WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR COMPOST

Incorporating compost into flowerbeds and vegetable gardens will make a huge difference in the growth, vigor and productivity of the plants. You don’t need much; a half-inch layer dug into the top 6 inches of soil will do. Too much can actually stifle plant growth.

 

Spread compost in beds, under shrubs and trees, and even over the lawn. Water it in and stand back. Compost supplies everything your plants need and can be used in place of fertilizers. In some cases you may have special problems that need the addition of trace elements or other special treatment, but the compost will handle most of your plant nutrition.

 

WHAT ABOUT WORM COMPOST?

You can also enlist worms to do your dirty work. A worm compost bin can be a simple box or a ready-made multi-tiered annelid apartment complex. Either way, the idea is that specially trained red worms gobble up your kitchen scraps and garden clippings, and quickly turn them into ultra-rich worm compost that’s laden with good things your garden needs. In fact, worm compost is even better for your garden than plain vanilla compost. If you want to learn more about worm composting, visit http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html or see a pretty cool video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjjuYNilM60.

 

Composting is easy and it’s an essential part of closing the nutrient loop. A sustainable garden isn’t complete without some kind of composting system. Have fun with yours.

 

 

Adversarial Horticulture

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I don’t watch TV much. I’m too busy and TV makes me restless, and besides I enjoy the smug feeling of being able to act as though I’m above all that. But now and then when I’m in a hotel room and there’s nothing better to do, my dark side comes out and I find myself watching tacky cop shows and other lowbrow dreck. I’m not too proud of that, but there it is.   

A few springs ago I made a visit to a local desert and got severely rained out as soon as I arrived. There was nothing to do except hole up in a cheesy motel until the wicked storm passed. Surfing through the channels I came upon an ad for power garden equipment. The sponsor was one of the large national home improvement store chains. Like so many ads, this one was a little 60-second play in which the Happy Suburban Homeowner (a 30-ish white male) ventures out to the far corners of his lot, his sturdy shoulders hung with a goodly arsenal of power tools – weed whacker, lawnmower, chainsaw, etc. 

Looking like he’s bound for Iraq, HSH disappears into the shrubbery. Soon a cacophony of snarling motor noises emerges from the greenery, and bits of hedge and grass fly up as the foliage quakes and shivers as if it were being devoured by a giant gopher. After a while, HSH emerges, a bit soiled, with his hat askew and his t-shirt hanging out. But he has a happy grin because he has once again prevailed against the enemy that is his garden. Cut to the logos of Toro, John Deere and Green Machine.   

Such is the relationship many of us have with our yards. We accept, and are even eager about, the apparent necessity to engage in a fierce war with the garden as part of our Saturday domestic ritual. Thus a place intended to be a peaceful refuge from the world’s troubles becomes a chlorophyll-soaked battleground strewn with the severed branches and mutilated grass blades of a suburbia in mortal conflict. 

I call this Adversarial Horticulture. I also call it unnecessary. It is not what we really have in mind, is it? Truth is, if you take a little extra time to design stability into your landscape you won’t need to struggle. The garden you create will be on your side and stern measures won’t be needed.

Gardeners are pathetic control freaks. We really are. I include myself in this. We cultivate a benign image that is utterly at odds with our truly vicious nature. The Gentle Art of Gardening? My foot. If weeds are to be counted as plants then we kill far more than we grow, do we not? If insects are among the wildlife we claim to love, then we must include genocide among our activities. We pinch, prune, shear, slash, chop, dig up, bury, squash, graft, coppice, espalier, pollard, girdle, tie up, tie down, stake, eradicate, poison, drown, trap, suffocate, and just plain murder. The monstrous things we do to plants and insects would land us in prison if we did them to a puppy. So much of gardening is about control and so little is about truly nurturing. (Gee, I hate to get political here, but a recent study revealed that Democrats spend most of their gardening time nurturing plants, while Republicans, if they garden, spend their time tidying up and shearing plants into unnatural shapes. Not to cast any aspersions or anything.) 

Why do we behave this way? Do we use the garden to act out our frustrations at being otherwise out of control at home, at work, on the street? When we can’t deal with our teenagers or our spouses or our boss, does the garden serve as a surrogate? If so, we have a great deal of work to do on ourselves. On the other hand, if all this is made necessary by the condition of our gardens themselves, then we had best get to work on creating a better garden. I’ll share more in future posts about how to make this happen. For now, know that help is on the way.



Coming up for a look

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  1.  

Hello gardening friends,

 
It has been close to a year since I completed the manuscript for my latest book, Sustainable Landscaping for Dummies. Writing a book is a huge commitment and it takes a lot out of a person. For several months after the book was finally finished, I didn’t want to write anymore than I wanted to eat a bag of triple sixteen on toast. But time has passed and I’m once again in the grip of the urge to share observations about the fun and follies and great potential of gardening and landscaping. 
 
This fine summer afternoon sitting under my apricot tree with my laptop on my lap and my two cats by my side, I reached a threshold, not really expecting to, and here I am more or less impulsively stepping into the world of blogging. It’s not a completely impetuous act because, truth be told, I’ve been reading about blogging for a while and thinking it would be a good soapbox and, not incidentally, a savvy modern way to promote my books and my landscaping business. Yes, cyberspace is crass that way and I’m not about to be coy about it. I would love to reach out to all of you with garden wisdom, humor, pathos, and insights. And I’d love it even more if my doing so were to inspire you to buy one or more of my books, to contact me about a design project or garden coaching, or to ask about our new sustainable landscape analysis service (I’ll talk more about that in future blogs). But if you learn something here that will help you to have a better, easier, cheaper, prettier, environmentally friendlier garden then I shall be happy, with or without the other rewards.
 
I haven’t been so impulsive as to ignore the question of what this blog will be about. I’ll be writing about the insights I’ve accumulated over nearly 40 years of working as a professional gardener, landscape contractor, and landscape architect, as well as the experience I’ve gained as an educator, a writer, and a television personality. The arc of my career has been broad and high. I continue to enjoy (and sometimes be alarmed by) wild leaps of understanding of what landscaping and gardening are all about. Many is the morning when I awake with yet another BIG IDEA and an unsettling feeling that I’ve just been propelled into yet another ring of the seemingly endless universe known as horticulture. 
 
It started with a love for wild places and the idea that if our gardens worked more like nature does they’d be a lot more attractive and we’d be a lot less burdened by them. Acting on that insight I started my little landscaping and gardening business in 1971. But I soon realized there was much more to it than that. Droughts, wildfires, floods, pest invasions, changes in society’s beliefs about land and our relationship to it, and many more factors soon became driving forces that made me take a fresh look, over and over again, at what landscaping is and what it could become. The original dream I dreamed so many years ago has grown larger, deeper, more compelling. I don’t expect this to stop any time soon, nor would I want it to. The fact is, we who live in the world of horticulture and related fields can never fully know the import of our work. We can only continue to seek out deeper levels of understanding and to incorporate new wisdom — ours, that of others, and the inherent wisdom of nature itself — into our activities. Beneath it all, for me, runs the abiding belief that what we do matters, that working with land and natural forces is important. We may not always be skillful, we may not always be right. We are always learning and being humbled by what is larger and wiser than us. Yet, we who love land hold the key, I believe, to a better life for all.
 
So my aim is to share some of those deeper levels of horticulture with you in this blog. I call it The Earthworm’s Lair because it is the earthworm who goes deep into the soil, transforms its rich elements into a usable form, and delivers the results to the surface where they can be made use of by the ecosystem. So consider me your personal earthworm and enjoy my castings as you see fit.
 
Sometimes the postings here will be funny (I can’t and won’t be serious all the time), and sometimes they’ll be sober. I shall make passes at profundity when I can summon up the chutzpah to do so. I hope to entertain as well as educate, and to touch something in you that matters more than the technical details. 
 
I will, of course, be delighted to hear your thoughts and comments. Please let me know what you think, what you know, what you’ve learned. Think of this blog as a sunny patio where we can sit a spell and chat. Make yourself comfortable and tell us what’s on your mind.
 
I’ll start with a overview. It’s an introduction to a book that I wrote a few years ago. That book never quite came about, and the introduction has moldered away in my files for long enough. It still looks pretty righteous to me, perhaps a bit overly serious but I get that way at times and am just as unapologetic about it as I am about being goofy and silly at other times. I promise to make my next post as fun as this one is sober. For now, consider this a window into what gardens might become if we follow our deepest and best visions.
 
So, with a deep breath I shall release this into cyberspace and see what happens next. Enjoy.
 
Owen Dell
 
 
p.s.  Please visit my website for more information on sustainable landscaping and to order my books. Thanks!
 
p.p.s. If this was too serious for you, then check out the rock video I did with the co-host of my television show Garden Wise Guys, the inimitable Billy Goodnick.
 
 
 

 

OK, Here’s the intro…

 
 
 

…the reason

for some silly-looking fishes,

for the bizarre mating

of certain adult insects,

or the sprouting, say,

in a snow tire

of a Rocky Mountain grass,

is that the universal

loves the particular,

that freedom loves to live

and live fleshed full,

intricate,

and in detail.

 

From “Feast Days”

By Annie Dillard

 

I often wonder what is to become of mankind. We are kind and cruel, sensitive and clueless, creative and destructive, a study in contradictions if ever there was one. Today we teeter on the precipice of environmental collapse and yet few seem able to do anything about it. We flirt with another form of disaster in the endless wars we fight with one another, and we have enjoyed just a handful of years without war in all of human history. Despite the unique imperatives of our moment in time, we go on as if nothing much had changed since the beginnings of civilization, and we seem quite prepared to sleepwalk to our own doom. It’s not a pretty picture. Yet there are so many solutions at hand, and so much good work to be done that I believe if only humanity would turn to the task, things would start to get better fast. I’m a gardener, which means I’m an optimist. Bertrand Russell once wrote, “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk to my gardener I’m convinced of the opposite.”

What is the role of gardening in such a crazy world? Is there any possible justification in making or enjoying a garden, or in writing or reading about gardens? Despite the fact that I know the happy answer to that question, I have many times despaired over what seemed to be the indefensible nature of my professional life. I don’t know why I have at times allowed myself to wallow in this self-doubt. Perhaps it has been my conscience’s way of keeping me honest by forcing me to question, over and over again, the legitimacy of my life’s work.

After much soul-searching, this is how I see it: Your garden and mine are our personal chunks of nature. They are no longer pure nature, yet they are still part of the natural world. Denuded of their endemic inhabitants, rain still falls on them, photosynthesis proceeds in the leaves of exotic species of plants, odd foreign animals gambol about. The garden is at once our shame, our legacy, our pleasure pit, our little protectorate.

For the most part, gardens are made and maintained very badly. The reasons for changing that are many. In the context of global crisis one obvious and primary one is the restoration of some degree of order, sustainability and ecological sanity on a yard-by-yard basis. If that were all we could do, it would be enough.

But a garden is also a refuge, a sanatorium for weary spirits, a bit of personal agriculture, a place of joy and a thing of beauty. Those are all important too, for without healthy bodies and spirits we have nothing. When the world outside looks grim, we can always turn to the garden for nourishment, peace, and safety.

The garden, then, can be the place where we practice personal and planetary healing. As Annie Dillard says, the universal loves the particular. Use the information in this blog to delve into the particulars of gardening and of your garden, and to bring the full-fleshed richness of life to it and to you. It’s a difficult and joyous task. Begin.

 

 

New Product Highlight: Planting Holes

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As any gardener is well aware, one of the most labor-intensive and difficult jobs in landscaping is digging holes. Now, after years of research and testing at the legendary Etaoin Shrdlu Sustainable Landscaping Institute in southern Israel, a revolutionary new product is available that will forever eliminate the need to dig in hard, heavy soils.

Today, Institute scientists have introduced the first-of-its-kind “Nova Lacuna Prefabricated Planting Hole™.” Originally developed for agriculture, the Nova Lacuna is just as useful for professional landscapers and home gardeners. By using these special holes, it’s possible to save time, labor, and money. Installation is simple, and the holes are durable, lightweight, and made from fair trade recycled (and recyclable) material derived from pruning waste generated in the vast organic Açai-berry plantations of Kenya. The Nova Lacuna is presently available in 3 sizes: 1 gallon, 5 gallon and 15 gallon. More sizes, along with prefab trenches, ditches, and swales, will be on the market soon, bringing the installation of eco-friendly rain gardens and bioswales within reach even for gardeners with physical or financial limitations. Nova Lacuna products are sturdily constructed to last a lifetime. Tapered sides allow stacking for compact shipping and easy storage. In addition to use in planting operations, Nova Lacuna products may also be used as postholes, holes for footings, holes to bury dog droppings, and other applications.

I think this is a truly great milestone in sustainable landscaping. Imagine no more laborious digging or wasteful piles of leftover soil. I recommend that readers keep a stock of Nova Lacuna products at hand, especially during spring and fall planting seasons.

For more information, click here.

A Sustainable Alternative to Power Leaf Blowers

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My dear friend and colleague, landscape contractor Ken Foster of Terra Nova Ecological Landscaping in Santa Cruz, California, has been one of the few brave landscape professionals to speak out against that sacred cow of the garden maintenance industry, the gasoline-powered leaf blower. And he speaks out well, having marshaled the many troublesome impacts of blowers into his of January, 2012. He has even founded a Leaf Blower Task Force in his community in order to bring some sanity to the unfortunate and widespread deployment of what he calls “Polluting Noise Bazookas” (also known in some circles as “Lucifer’s Trumpet”). Others too have decried the folly of the leaf blower, and there is even good data showing that there is no actual efficiency to be gained by their use.

But what are the alternatives? Well, of course brooms and rakes still work as well as ever, and there is much to be said for their revival. They are fossil-fuel-free, they always start right up, don’t make a racket, and are dirt cheap to purchase and maintain. But there are those whose dispositions seem to require a more elaborate technology in order to feel good about their gardening chores. To help meet their needs, I recently set out on a quest for an ideal, pollution-free alternative blower, and I believe I’ve found something that really works. It has taken no small amount of research, but I’m proud to say that I’ve come up with a great little device that’s human-powered, recycled, and, believe it or not, that also eliminates a completely unrelated but quite troublesome problem.

A little background: Not long ago I attended a concert of Celtic music. Things were going along pleasantly enough until they brought out the bagpipers. As you probably know, bagpipes were developed to use when sending armies off to battle. Medieval military strategists discovered that the sound of only two or three of the instruments was sufficient to stimulate the murderous impulses of up to a thousand soldiers. Bagpipes work fast, as I was reminded at this concert. After just a few seconds of exposure to the awful droning I was more than ready to slay a few of my neighboring audience members. As I gripped the arms of my seat, I realized that a great deal of wind was being blown about to no apparent purpose. That’s when it dawned on me that the bagpipe, properly modified, would be a wonderful eco-friendly substitute for the leaf blower. I envisioned teams of kilted gardeners roaming suburban streets, pumping the distended bladders of their instruments and happily whooshing litter into tidy piles.

Back at my laboratory, I put on my best tartan coveralls and began to tinker with a set of bagpipes, working out the details of its transformation into a fine gardening implement. (Tip: Used and reclaimed bagpipes are easy and inexpensive to come by. Neighbors of bagpipe players are often happy to break in and steal them for you, usually at no charge.)

I discovered that a few minor alterations (easily accomplished by any reasonably handy person using a power drain auger and a ball peen hammer) can quickly render the typical bagpipe mute, while retaining and even enhancing its Aeolian properties, sort of like de-scenting a skunk. This results in improved conditions in two entirely separate realms, in the manner of Will Rogers’ observation about the Dust Bowl migration: that it raised the collective IQs in both Oklahoma and California. Without bothering you with the technical details, I can tell you that a properly transformed set of pipes and a strong pair of lungs can equal or exceed the 200 mile per hour streams of air touted by power blower manufacturers.

Using the Scottish Leaf Blower™ is easy. Just mount the device under your arm in the traditional position, exhale into the blowstick to fill the bag, point the drones at the ground, and pump away at the bag to achieve maximum velocity. You’ll find that using the SLB, as I’ve come to call it, is quiet, easy, and enjoyable, and every bit as effective as that gas hog you’ve been using.

For detailed instructions on converting a set of bagpipes into a Scottish Leaf Blower, please contact me. I am making this information available as a public service to gardeners and music lovers everywhere.

In my next post I’ll show you how to turn a vuvuzela into an eco-friendly bulb planter. For now, happy puffing.

Beyond Sustainable Landscapes

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My March, 2011 post on rain barrels has generated a great deal of discussion both here on the blog and elsewhere. It seems to have gone viral and has been showing up all over the place. Prevailing opinion is favorable to my position that rain barrels are not useful and not sustainable. There are, of course, some dissenting opinions and nuances. If you missed the conversation or haven’t checked in to see all the comments, you may be interested in revisiting the article.

As interesting as all this is, it misses the real point. There is a meta-question that needs to be answered, and a proper answer will render moot much of the discussion about conservation and sustainability. I’ll cut to the chase: Why are we creating landscapes that do not survive on rainfall and natural soil fertility, and that for the most part do not offer up ecological services in excess of their negative impacts? Why should we waste our time and intelligence on trying to adapt to a paradigm that accepts landscapes requiring more resources than nature delivers, and to one that doesn’t ask anything of the landscape other than that it be pretty?

Yet much if not all of the activities generated by the sustainable landscaping movement (and indeed by the green building movement as well) assume a continued, if abated, consumption of resources, and rely more on novel technologies often of dubious merit (smart controllers, synthetic lawns, etc.) than on creating place-adapted natural ecosystems. This blindness to reality is going to kill us, more slowly than the old ways, but just as surely. We are evolving systems that destroy the planet but at a more languid pace, and there is an unspoken assumption that in our unquestioned strivings for luxury and comfort we will use everything up sooner or later. This is the elephant on the lawn that nobody wants to talk about.

SETTING A HIGHER STANDARD

Anyway, sustainability is not the issue. Defining sustainable as the standard sets the bar too low. Sustainability is about being “less bad,” in the words of sustainability’s Number One Guru William McDonough. I don’t agree with McDonough about everything, but I shall be forever grateful to him for calling out any approach that means only to reduce the negative impacts of an activity or structure. A so-called “green” building that merely cuts energy use or substitutes a less damaging material for a conventional one, or that hews to any or even all of the accepted standards for sustainable construction as codified in LEED or other standards, isn’t a good-enough building. It still has tremendous negative impacts both on and off site.

And landscaping is no different. Until we free ourselves from the conceit that a couple of rain barrels or some native plants and a drip system are an adequate response to the challenge of creating a living ecosystem that delivers more services than it demands, we will be forever creating sub-optimal projects.

Sustainability is not the issue. Adaptive productivity is the issue. Being less bad is not good enough. Being useful, beneficial, worth the costs is what we need to strive for, and nothing less will do. After all, everything is at stake, isn’t it?

Local Man Reconnects With Nature on Facebook

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[Friends: I know this doesn’t have a lot to do with landscaping, but it’s such a moving story that I thought I should share it with you. Enjoy and be inspired. OD]

A Santa Barbara resident credits Facebook with rekindling his love affair with nature after decades of estrangement. Self-employed SEO consultant James “Rico” Innes says that the pressures of a busy life drew him away from his relationship with the natural world, but Facebook brought him back. “When I was younger, nature experiences were a major part of my life,” reports Innes, “I used to spend hours watching National Geographic specials on television, and I would really enjoy going to those old Nature Company stores and playing with all the cool gadgets. And of course I loved to watch sunsets from the balcony of my condo, but I just don’t have time to look at them anymore.”

The pressures of career, family, and heavy smart phone use had pretty much eliminated Innes’ contact with the natural world. But this past spring, the old yearnings called to him, and he sought a way to get back to his roots. “One day, I was looking for Katy Perry’s Facebook page, thinking maybe I would friend her, or at least check out her profile. I mistakenly typed ‘Kath’ instead of ‘Katy’ and this page on Kathmandu came up. I spent half an hour looking at these great images of mountains, and one thing led to another and pretty soon I had friended all the major peaks of the world: Mt. Whitney, Mt. Everest, K2, Kanchenjunga, Annapurna, the works. It was so exhilarating that I realized I had to spend more time in nature.”

Since then, Innes has friended spirit bears, monarch butterflies, Bactrian and dromedary camels, sea anemones, the Gobi Desert, redwood trees, mycorrhizal fungi, seventeen species of nutria, forty-seven kinds of metamorphic rock, Shamu the whale, E. coli O104:H4, and an orphaned manatee in south Florida.

Innes says, “My life is really back on track. I’m looking forward to so much more. Celebrities are great, but there’s nothing like nature.” Innes says he might even check out some YouTube videos of local beaches if he can find the time.

Water Budget Busting

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Here’s an important bit of advice that you will not see anywhere else. It could make all the difference in the success of your landscaping and in your water conservation efforts.

Conventional wisdom in the landscaping profession is that when the weather changes, you should adjust the amount of time that you water your plants, putting down more water when the weather is hot, dry, or windy, and less water when it’s cool, damp, or rainy. Nothing could be more wrongheaded. Here’s why:

First, watch this one and a half-minute video, then come back and I’ll explain why the information in the video, and all similar information that is commonly available, is foolish and dangerous. Here’s the link for the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZyPqn7J2hs.

OK, that seems helpful, right? Well, it’s not only not helpful, it’s downright reckless. The water budget feature adjusts the watering time by a percentage, up in hot weather and down in cool weather. It sounds perfectly logical. But…by adjusting the watering time, the depth of watering changes, so that sometimes the water will go twice as deep as usual and other times it might only go half as deep as usual. The roots, and therefore the plants, don’t get what they need. And because the system won’t come on until the next regularly scheduled watering day, which is NOT changed by the water budget feature, the plants have to endure perhaps DAYS of parching weather when they really need a drink this very minute. Water is wasted and the landscape suffers. This is really stupid, don’t you think?

So what SHOULD you be changing to account for the difference in demand caused by variations in the weather? You should be changing the FREQUENCY of irrigations, going from, for instance, two days a week in normal weather to three days a week in hot weather or one day a week in cool weather. After all, isn’t that what you would do if you were watering by hand? You would say to yourself, “Oh, it’s hot and things have dried out more quickly than usual. I’d better get out there and water!” You wouldn’t wait until your “regular” watering day and then apply twice as much water as usual. So if you know better, instinctually, then how come the people who make irrigation controllers, the people who install them, and the people who teach other people how to use them, don’t get it? Beats me. It’s just one of those things that seemed like a bright idea to some engineer who didn’t know squat about horticulture, and nobody – nobody – has ever bothered to question it. And we’re talking about tens of thousands of knowledgeable professionals here. By the way, there may be a controller out there that allows you to easily change the frequency of watering, but I haven’t found it yet.

OK, so now you’re smarter than virtually every landscape professional on the planet. What are you going to do about it? That’s right. You’re going to trot out to the garage and stick a piece of duct tape over that “Water Budget” button on your timer and never, ever change it from 100%. It is set at 100% isn’t it?

Next, you’ll need a way to vary the frequency of watering. This is where things get a little sticky, because you’ll have to go into each program on your controller and add or remove days. For instance, suppose your lawns on Program One are set to water two times a week during “normal” weather. If the weather heats up, then add another day, going from, say, Monday and Friday to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And when the weather cools down? You guessed it: Cut it back to once a week. That’s not hard to do, but it’s a good idea to plan it out in advance to be sure you don’t create overlaps that would cause two valves to come on at the same time, overtaxing the ability of the water supply to operate the system at adequate pressure. That’s no big deal either; just be sure each program has enough open time during the week to do what it needs to do.

Next you have to keep an eye on things to be sure your new settings are actually delivering the water at the point when the plants actually need it. If you see signs of drought or oversaturation, tweak your schedule as needed. It’s really not that hard, just a matter of observing your garden as any good gardener will do. You see, those controllers aren’t very useful without the wisdom and watchful eye of the gardener to make them do the right thing. Automating the system is not the same as optimizing the system. The former is handled very well by the controller; the latter is up to you.

The rewards for better water management are lower water bills, more money in your pocket, healthier plants, and lower negative impacts on the environment. A little effort pays you back generously. Give it a try!

 

Roll Out the Rain Barrels?

General

Rain barrels are the de rigueur item for urban eco-hipsters these days. They’re sold in every garden catalog, subsidized or given away by water districts, and touted by virtually every garden expert in creation as a way to reduce garden water use and be more “green.” There are rain barrel community workshops, rain barrel seminars, Web sites devoted to the emerging rain barrel culture, rain barrel discussion groups, rain barrel tweets, and, for all I know, rain barrel users dating services. Progressive gardeners who haven’t yet bought their barrel are made to feel wasteful and negligent for failing to acquire the latest in an endless series of products designed to save the planet. Thanks to relentless marketing, rain barrels are enjoying a potent dose of moral buzz that is fast turning them into a 21st Century version of the Great Tulip Mania.

HOW RAIN BARRELS WORK. The rain barrel idea is simple: Stick a drum under your downspout to catch rainwater and store it for later use. This is supposed to help the environment, lower your water bill, and make your garden thrive in dry times. And to be sure, there’s no point in throwing away rainwater if you can make use of it. After all, once rainwater hits the street, thanks to the highly efficient drainage systems that landscapers put in, it causes urban flooding and washes all kinds of nasty pollutants into the storm drains and thence into our creeks and finally to the ocean. Using rain is smart; whisking it off the property is stupid. So there’s a good idea behind this, but how does it play out?

In the name of water harvesting, intrepid companies have developed a truly impressive array of rain barrels, some of them repurposed from previously-used containers, and most of them made new from fresh, modern plastic. They parade across the pages of garden catalogs and Web sites in a happy fashion show of forms: Spartan repurposed, faux Grecian Urn, faux wood, faux stone, faux ceramic, concealed plant stand, bogus whiskey barrel, real whiskey barrel, collapsible, roll-away, pop-up, knock-down, “mega” rain barrels, “eco” rain barrels, rain barrel “systems.” They come in various shades of green, earth tones, terracotta, robin’s egg blue (seriously), and basic black. Amazon.com alone delivers 897 listings for rain barrels and rain barrel-related items. By and large they’re a homely bunch: Fanciful shapes and ersatz wood grain concealing the humdrum function of holding 50 to 65 gallons of rainwater. But if they really would help save the Earth, then who cares what they look like? After all, we’re in dire straits and can’t be troubling ourselves over matters of aesthetics, right?

YES, BUT DO THEY MAKE SENSE? Rain barrel proponents claim that barrels conserve water, reduce urban runoff, and save money. But is it true? Suspecting that a small flagon of rain wouldn’t begin to meet the water needs of the garden, and wondering if there was even a net positive outcome when the environmental impacts of making and shipping the product are balanced against the value of the water saved, I set out to get to the bottom of the barrel business.

Let’s begin with how much water is needed to run a typical garden. It’s a number that shocks most people, even experienced gardeners. According to the Metropolitan Water District, the average Southern California family uses about 234,000 gallons of water each year. Sixty percent of that, over 140,000 gallons, is used to water the yard. Using commonly available data on evapotranspiration rates in coastal Southern California, the Green Gardens Group calculated that a typical 1,500 square foot front yard on the South Coast with a lawn and some foundation plantings requires around 43,000 gallons of water per year. Looking further into the matter they found that, thanks to poor water management practices, typical water use is 2 to 3 times what is needed, with actual applied water often clocking in at over 100,000 gallons for the same small front yard.

So here’s a question: Which is better, to save 60 gallons of rain water by installing a rain barrel or to save over 1,000 times that amount simply by dialing back the watering to a reasonable level? Keep in mind that changing watering behavior costs nothing and delivers immediate and long-lasting results. In this instance, the mid-tier price of water in Santa Barbara is $4.90 per hundred cubic feet (HCF, equal to 748 gallons), which means that saving 60,000 gallons of water will reduce the water bill by $393 per year. By comparison, that smidgeon of water in the rain barrel is worth just over 39 cents.

What about the practicalities of watering your garden with rain barrels? It’s easy to see that it would take a heck of a lot of barrels to meet the water needs of a typical garden. Going back to that 140,000 gallons of water used by the average suburban landscape, one barrel will supply .00043 of the annual water need, or as landscape professionals say, a drop in the bucket. It would take 2,333 60-gallon barrels of water to meet the annual needs for irrigation. Each barrel takes up about 12 cubic feet, so 2,333 barrels require 28,000 cubic feet of space. The interior space of a 2,000 square foot house with 8 foot ceilings measures around 16,000 cubic feet. If you were to stack your rain barrels to the ceiling, you would need a volume equal to 1.75 additional houses to store this much water.

If you were to place the barrels on the ground one layer deep, they would require 9,332 sq. ft. of land, which is just under a quarter of an acre. Since the average suburban lot size in our area is around .17 acre, you would need 1.47 more lots just to store the water. Oh-oh, it’s time to buy out the neighbors and tear down their houses so you can water your garden. This must be the reason that none of the respected experts on rain water harvesting advocate or even mention rain barrels in their books and publications.

BULLYRAGGING THE BARREL BARONS. Just for fun, I submitted the following good-natured inquiry to a couple of Internet rain barrel vendors:

Hello,

I have a 7,500 square foot lot, and I use about 140,000 gallons of water per year for landscape irrigation. A single 60-gallon rain barrel will supply 0.00043 of my annual water needs, making it necessary for me to have 2,333 barrels to meet those needs. They will fill almost a quarter of an acre of land if placed side-by-side. My lot is only about .17 acres, and the house and garden take it all up. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you.

Rodger C. “Rod” Buck, Customer Care Variety Specialist at Hayneedle wrote back, “Unfortunately, we are strictly a retail on-line web site that does not get into anything as heavy-duty as you are describing. May I suggest that you check with a local company that specializes in wells and/or in rural cistern tanks?” I guess the point was kind of lost on Rod. The folks at Gardener’s Supply did a little better, and even played along with me: “Thank you for writing.  Our rain barrels are a great way to collect the free water from the sky, but as you have so eloquently pointed out, will not be a complete watering source for your garden. For small gardens, when rain is intermittent, they can be very helpful in aiding your watering needs.  They are intended to augment your watering, not take it over completely…we’d like to offer you a 10% discount. This is valid even if you want to order 2,333 barrels.” Sweet. I’ll keep that in mind if I ever take leave of my senses.

OTHER CONCERNS. Even if you had a one square-foot garden, which is what a barrel full of water will serve for the year, there are some additional issues that have to be looked at.

Suppose there isn’t enough rain to fill up the barrel? Just when you really need water most, your barrel is busy collecting dust and spiders. Not helpful. Not helpful at all.

If the barrel is located in the sun, you’ll be delivering potentially damaging hot water to your plants. Unless you like to cook your carrots while they’re still in the ground, this could very well be a problem.

How clean is the water? The first element in a real water harvesting system is what’s called a “first flush filter” that keeps contaminated water out of the system. You see, all sorts of guck collects on rooftops during our months-long dry season, and the first storm dissolves it all into a toxic soup that’s best sent down the drain. It’s not something you’d want to put on your plants. But the typical rain barrel, lacking a first flush filter, collects and stores the very most contaminated first part of the first flush. Please don’t invite me over for a taste of your rain barrel-irrigated spinach, OK?

Most barrels come with fine-mesh screens to keep mosquitoes from breeding in the water and prevent errant vermin from drowning in it. But of course the fragile screen will be the first part of the system to fail, and few owners will bother to replace it. How environmental is dead rat soup?

Is there a reasonable financial payback for the investment in a rain barrel? If the barrel fills 5 times a year, the annual value of the captured water is a little under two dollars. The cheapest available rain barrels cost around a hundred bucks, which means that the payback time for Santa Barbarans is at least half a century. It’s even longer where water rates are cheaper. In most cases, neither the barrel nor its owner can reasonably be expected to last long enough to see a return on the investment.

And what about the environmental impacts of making and disposing of the barrel itself? How much embodied energy is there in a rain barrel? Where do the materials come from? Is it recyclable at the end of its useful life? And how long could a barrel be expected to last anyway? Unfortunately, hard answers to these questions are not so easy to come by. Plastic is made from oil; we know that much. Although it’s often not spelled out, high-density polyethylene (HDPE) seems to be the material that most rain barrels are made from. HDPE is one of the least toxic plastics on the market, it will probably last at least ten years and possibly much longer, and it’s a #2 recyclable material. Beyond that, not much can be ascertained without fairly strenuous research beyond the capabilities of this poor writer.

GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL. Is it possible to do a full life-cycle analysis on a rain barrel, to determine in hard numbers whether it’s a net environmental good or bad thing? Not easily, given the difficulty of obtaining some of the key data such as embodied energy, lifespan, and the impacts of oil drilling, and then putting it all together in a definitive bottom-line formula. But it should be pretty obvious that whatever the other variables, rain barrels don’t solve the problem of water conservation.

All in all, rain barrels are a washout, another delusional, greenwashed, pernicious consumer scam. Maybe the next rain barrel group should be Rain Barrel Abusers Anonymous. “Hi, I’m Darlene and I have 2,333 rain barrels.” “Hi Darlene!”

REAL SOLUTIONS. What’s a better use of resources? How can you really save water? Well, rainwater harvesting, done properly, is an essential element in a sustainable landscape. And yes, the amount of water you can capture can be impressive. A typical roof will deliver 600 gallons per 1,000 square feet of surface area per inch of rain falling on it. In real-world terms that means that an average Santa Barbara rainfall year’s 18 inches of rain landing on a 2,000 square feet roof will generate 21,600 gallons of water, which (in case you were wondering) is worth $141.00. In a nutshell, there are two basic approaches to water harvesting, both involving the canny capture of roof water.

NON-STORAGE STRATEGIES. One is to let rainfall flow across and sink into the soil, deep watering plants as it goes. This can be accomplished by changing the contours of your land to create low spots, soak zones, dry streambeds, and other concavities that will allow the water to pool and seep into the soil. (IMPORTANT ADVICE: Don’t try this on hillsides or where there is any potential for landslides, flooding of structures, or other untoward outcomes. And keep the water at least five feet away from the house. In fact, check with a geologist, landscape architect, water harvesting professional or other qualified expert before changing the grade on your property.) Concave, water-slurping landscapes are now required in some progressive communities, and properly done they make a lot of sense. Water stays on the land where it belongs, and the larger environment doesn’t suffer from the effects of dumping excess quantities of rainfall into the street. Creating a concave landscape is relatively easy and inexpensive if done at the time the landscape is created, but even an established landscape can often accommodate a swale, dry streambed, rain garden, or other absorbent zone. These are also very attractive additions to the landscape.

STORAGE STRATEGIES. Of course just moving and slowing water only works during the rainy season. Summer is another matter, and the rain barrel idea is a stab at addressing the issue of how to get access to water during the dry months of the year. Storing water does work, but only if you have the space and capital to create a fully-fledged system of one or more cisterns, which are above-ground or buried tanks. Do keep in mind, though, that rainwater takes up just as much room in a big tank as it does in hundreds of small barrels, so one of the big questions is where do you put the stuff? Unlike dry streambeds, cisterns are usually ugly, and they’re expensive, running between fifty cents and two dollars per gallon of storage capacity. That means that storing even 10,000 gallons of rainwater, a small fraction of what your garden probably needs, could easily run you ten or twenty grand. You can buy a lot of water for that amount of money. Back to the question of where to put the cistern, well, you can tuck a lot of water under a deck, or put a tank out on the back forty (if you’re lucky enough to have a back forty), or dig a giant hole and bury the thing. Still, this is clearly not for everybody. But if you have the resources, a big slug of water on site is like money in the bank, keeping you soothed and safe. By the way, with the addition of a pump, a cistern can be used to fight wildfires too, which is never a bad idea in our flammable communities.

For more information on water harvesting, turn to the real experts. Brad Lancaster and our own local genius Art Ludwig both offer great, detailed advice on this surprisingly complex subject. Check out their Web sites for information, books, and other resources.

Oh, by the way, if you know of anyone who’s in the market for a couple thousand barrels, cheap, have them give me a call.