water wisdom
coping with aridification in Southern California
Rainwater harvesting: Infiltration features
One category of rainwater harvesting uses Mother Earth as your “storage device.” You design your landscape, including choices on surface materials and making decisions about the grading (land sculpting), with the goal of making water soak into the ground. Up until fairly…
Rainwater harvesting: Capture and Store devices
I’ve written before about rain barrels. At the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, we have rain tanks. TreePeople has a massive cistern up on Mulholland. All of these devices — rain barrels, rain tanks, cisterns — are what are considered…
Water waste or water savings – which are you planning for?
If the most current forecasts prove true, we in drought-wracked Southern California could be in for a very wet winter. Weather analysts are predicting a Godzilla El Niño, with once-in-a-generation levels of rainfall. Rainwater harvesting is the word of the…
What benefits does your drought-tolerant garden provide?
A California Natives garden can be a beautiful haven for bees, pollinators, butterflies, beneficial insects, birds, and urban wildlife. An edible garden can feed you and your family, perhaps with extra to share with your neighbors and the food pantry…
Make your own flowerpot ollas
how to make an easy, inexpensive, DIY olla for your garden - using flowerpots
Raised beds vs. Sunken beds
With effusive and glorious terms, the garden catalogs and East Coast garden magazines try to persuade us that “to be a successful vegetable gardener you need raised beds.” Not in Southern California. Consider what is behind those arguments: a drive…
Are you Ready for Rain?
I’ve been thinking about rain a lot lately, especially since we have 151 adobe bricks laid out right now, supposedly drying in the sun. We’ve had to do tarp-foraging, and monitor hourly weather forecasts, and get together a Tarping Team…
Building water-saving features with urbanite
Today was our first earth-building workshop. Since I’m a little lean on earth-building handouts, here’s a substitute. It’s not particularly about earth-building, but it is about earth-wise construction. It’s about building with “urbanite,” which is a name for reused broken concrete.…
How to Build a Garden Sink
You pull a carrot from your garden and take it to your kitchen for dinner. Before you can put it on your kid’s dinner plate, you have to wash it. A mess of black dirt spatters all over your kitchen…
What we can do about water use
We have a “use it once, then send it away” attitude about many earth resources, and water is just one of these. Right now, we’re feeling the pinch because of the California drought. But these times are a reminder to shift…
