Here it is. Take it.

Map showing Metropolitan's service area and aqueducts. MWD's announcement comes on the back of the state Department of Water Resources reporting snowpack in the California mountains to be 165% of the April 1 average. Single click on the map for the DWR release.

“We anticipate residential consumers and businesses throughout the Southland will continue to use water efficiently,” said Jeffrey Kightlinger, General Manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in a press release signaling that the giant wholesaler will be resuming full deliveries of water to 26 member agencies after several years of shortages. The shortages triggered region-wide conservation programs, whose fates and continued effectiveness are unclear in the momentary face of plenty. Click here for the full release.

 …

April fully loaded

Lemonade entrepreneurs kept visitors hydrated at last year's Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase.

April 2011 may go down in the record books as the best month ever for tours, classes and plant sales held by Southern California’s gathering water and energy conservation movements. Click here for a full listing, then ready your date books. By all means check out the rest of the March calendar as well.

The Dry Garden: New Year/Water Year

Saturday may mark the start of the 2011 calendar year, but the 2011 water year, the 12-month cycle used by hydrologists and water managers, began on Oct. 1.

Few Southern California water years have begun on such a dry note. Three months ago, a strengthening La Niña pattern in the Pacific suggested to climatologists that we were staring at a water year so potentially dry that it could make your voice rasp.

Then in December a weather system known as the Pineapple Express carried near-record rains through California. The upshot in Los Angeles County is that most places have already received half or more of the rain expected for the entire season. It’s reasonable to expect that when the 2011 water year ends Sept. 30, we will have reached or surpassed the regional average of about 16 inches, with numbers that are higher in the foothills and lower in

The Dry Garden: 275 lawns down, 79,725 to go in Long Beach

Plaudits, not sprinklers, were flowing this week when the Heal the Bay president, a Surfrider Foundation policy director, a vice mayor and water company general manager gathered in the garden of a Long Beach handyman to ooh and aah over the salvia.

They were there to praise citizens of Long Beach who embraced the first of two rounds of rebates — $2.50 per square foot lawn converted to low-water garden — that started in April. It stands to reason that clean-ocean advocates would appreciate how important it is to check the stream of pesticide and fertilizer pollution that runs into the Pacific from lawn-sprinkler overflow. But what has dazzled everyone familiar with the Beautiful Long Beach Lawn-to-Garden Incentive Program is how citizens of this beach city have been so ready to do their part. The first day that the Long Beach Water Department began accepting applications, conservation specialist Joyce Barkley

The Dry Garden: Not cool

The most common mistake bruited about Los Angeles is that it’s in a desert. It’s not. It’s in one of five of the world’s Mediterranean climate zones, which means that it has a largely temperate but dry climate with winter rain and rainless summers. That said, last Monday, we got a taste of what really living in a desert is like. Santa Ana winds out of the high desert of the Great Basin drove temperatures to 113F in downtown Los Angeles. If your garden wasn’t stressed, you probably don’t have one. Click here for this week’s Dry Garden column in the LA Times on how to irrigate in Southern California during the October-December Santa Ana season.

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    Emily Green by e-mail at emily.green [at] mac.com
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