California is Thirsty!

California is thirsty. The drought conditions of the last 22 years are worse than the last 1200 years! Sixty-six percent of California, including where Rivendell is located, are in zones considered “Severe Drought”. It’s a strange thing to write about after December and January’s atmospheric river downpour, where we got two and a half inches of rain in one week! In truth though, a wet month, or even an unusually wet year, will not reverse the long term trend. Reservoirs are drying up here, and the aquifer is in rough shape.

We think a lot about this in designing Rivendell. We’ve always imagined it as a verdant oasis, a place rich with plants and birds. Shade trees a plenty to escape the summer heat. We plan to grow most of the food we eat, as well as much of what the animals will eat. We have city water on the site, but relying on this exclusively will be expensive and, in our view, not responsible. Right in the midst of the deluge last week I saw sprinklers coming on for lawns in our neighborhood. California can no longer afford such extravagances with our most basic resource.

Kelly and I have also been really delving into permaculture, a gardening system where water conservation is front and center. From our research and rumination, we have come up with several ideas for keeping our water use on “low flow”.

We will be collecting rain water from all of our structures: house, shed, greenhouse, chicken coop, etc. The gutter systems will deliver the water into 50 gallon barrels. Our area has wildly different precipitation year to year, but if we consider an average of 10” per year, we can calculate how much water we might get. A 220 square foot structure should collect about 1200 gallons per year. And we’ll have multiples of these. The great thing about rainwater is it is soft and free of bleach or additives. Plants love it!

From the barrels, we’ll use a portable pump to move the water into 275 gallon tanks by the greenhouse and raised beds. This will feed our drip irrigation system for the vegetables, starts, herbs, etc.

We want to line the fences with trees, including the water loving citrus and avocado that do so well in our valley. We hope to use the natural contours of the land to help keep them hydrated, rather than relying on city water to do so.

The top of Rivendell proper, where the house and animal structures will be, naturally slopes down. From the heavy rainfall recently we have a pretty good picture of how water naturally flows down this incline. The animal structures will be at the apex of the hill, insuring that our furred friends are staying dry, and there is no standing water to contend with. We will be trenching causeways for the water, following the direction it tends to go naturally, and capturing the water at the hill bottom to hydrate the roots of our trees. This will be through a permaculture trick called a swale - a trench that you dig just uphill of your crop. The trench will fill with water, and you can use organic material to slow its absorption. The tree roots will drink from this bastion of collected rain water, long past rainy season. Voila!

We have a well at the base of the property, which was dug but does not have a functioning pump. Our original plan was to have the power company hook us up with 50 amps from the street to connect a pump system. I discussed this idea with a local permaculturist, and he suggested using a solar powered pump instead. This would likely not provide the juice to deliver adequate flow on demand, even with a quickstart option, but we do not need the water where the well is located (it was put there, we think, by the previous land owners because they intended to have an avocado orchard by the creek). We would use the well water to supplement the water for the irrigation system and other orchard locations up the hill. A simple solar system would be adequate for a slow drip, filling a barrel that we then relocate to where the water storage is located. We’ll use a transfer pump to fill the tank. When we do not need the water, we just turn off the well pump. The aquifer in the Pacific southwest, the underground source for well water, has taken a beating from over consumption. Aquifer health, and waterway health, are intimately related. We intend to only take what will be used. The beauty of this idea is that the solar pump will be lower cost initially then grid power, and will insure the water has no ongoing cost to us. It will be a good back up for a dry year.

In addition to finding better sources for water, we have plans on how to reduce our water consumption. We realize that our animal residents will require a lot of water! We need to offset that by reducing human consumption whenever possible. I’m looking into ways to re-use grey water for agriculture. Grey water is a term generally used for RVs and off-grid dwellings, where water from sinks, showers, etc are disposed of separately from waste water. Gray water is generally not dangerous and many RVers dump it on the side of the road, letting random plants get a free drink. The state of CA does allow limited use of greywater for agriculture. It cannot be stored (gets smelly) and must be delivered at least 2” underground. It can be a hydration source for trees, non-edible plants and bushes, etc. Greywater will include soaps, so one must be careful about what one uses. One of our plans is to create our own mild, plant-friendly soaps and detergents, using land-local material like sagebush and so forth. We hope to install a passive system, gravity fed, for plants downslope of our home. I suspect we will focus on water from bathroom sinks and showers, rather than the flow from kitchen sinks, to keep the water free of food particles. If all succeeds as planned, every shower and load of laundry will produce water for the trees providing us shade during the summer months. Cool, yea?

Whenever we wonder why to go through this trouble and expense, all we have to do is spend an hour creekside at the Shire. The clean water flowing there keeps the local populations of birds, rodents, coyotes, bobcats, deer, raccoons, etc - hydrated and healthy. Water conservation is yet another way to take care of our animal cousins. The drought is hard on them too…