Free except the lemonade
Posted on | April 3, 2013 | No Comments
Emily Green is on assignment. Slow to no-posting is likely to continue through April. Please help yourself to the site’s directories and, for those of you in the Los Angeles region interested in rain water harvesting and lawn alternatives, do remember that the Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase is on April 20th. Admission to dozens of gardens, many staffed by experts in native landscaping, water harvesting and food production, is free.
High good, low bad: Mead in March 2013
Posted on | April 1, 2013 | No Comments
It’s been a dry year. At the close of March 2013, according to the federal Bureau of Reclamation, Lake Mead, the largest storage reservoir on the Colorado River, stood at 52% full.
Reclamation assessments of the Colorado headwater region snowpack that will replenish Mead over the summer — not necessarily as fast as it is drained — vary between 61% to 77% of normal (top graphic).
Southern Californians might take comfort that a big slug of their water doesn’t come from the Colorado River, but an aqueduct run hundreds of miles north to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta.
However, according to the California Department of Water Resources, the Sierra snowpack serving So Cal’s Bay Delta siphon is roughly half of normal (middle graphic).
So, might ask residents of the City of Los Angeles, who have a third source of imported water, what about the Owens Valley region snowpack serving the aqueduct that Mulholland built?
In March, accumulation of this Eastern Sierra supply dropped sharply below long-term means (bottom graphic).
Agency personnel and homeowners who capture local water in the LA basin might also feel shortchanged this year. 
Rainfall here is running less than half of average across the basin and a third and more short in the foothills.
For information about the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, click here, or visit Maven’s Notebook for inside water news and background and navigational help with copious documents. For Colorado River information for California, Nevada, Arizona and Mexico, click here, and here for Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado.
Double click on the graphics above to enlarge them.
A day at the museum
Posted on | March 21, 2013 | 2 Comments
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will mark its centennial in
June with the opening of a 3.5-acre garden designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer (left). The premises include a new demonstration food garden (top), an allee of rebar palm sculptures doubling as rose trellising (below left) and a large, densely planted native garden along the Exposition Boulevard entrance (below right). According to the garden’s director Carol Bornstein (below center), the site will serve as a research plot into urban ecology that will double as much-needed green space for museum visitors and local residents. Click here for more information. The preview tour of the museum grounds was part of the Thursday Garden Talk series with Lili Singer organized by the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. Photos: Emily Green
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County > Nature Park
Pardon our wildflowers
Posted on | February 20, 2013 | No Comments
Posting has slowed to a standstill while I am on assignment. Please feel free to browse the resource pages and archives of this site or to contact me with any queries. -Emily Green
“There is not enough water in the river”
Posted on | February 10, 2013 | No Comments
“Dropping out of the southern Rockies to carve a tiny corner from northwest New Mexico, the San Juan is the state’s largest river by volume, a ribbon of green in one of the driest parts of the state,” writes John Fleck in the Albuquerque Journal. “For part of its path, it passes through the Navajo Nation, the 25,000-square-mile Indian reservation spread across parts of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. Some 7,000 square miles of the reservation are in New Mexico, home to an estimated 40,000 Navajo people.” Click on the map to keep reading Fleck on Navajo claims on the San Juan.
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