High good, low bad: Mead in 2011
Posted on | January 1, 2012 | No Comments
When the federal Bureau of Reclamation recorded the closing elevation of Lake Mead to be almost 1,133 feet at midnight, December 31, the 2011 rise in the largest storage reservoir on the Colorado River was more than 46 feet, the first annual gain since 2005 and the largest since 1957 — so big that the decanting of last year’s snowpack has been causing a series of earthquakes in the Arizona desert. As Mead hits 56% full, and the other major storage reservoir on the Colorado, Lake Powell, sits at 66%, the bad news is that snowpack building up this year around the Colorado’s headwaters in the Rockies is significantly down, as is Northern Californian snowpack in the Sierra. Locally, rainfall is also below normal. By way of explaining the artwork, the Reclamation graphic above contrasts projected flow and demand in a river supplying roughly a third of Southern California’s water.
Full metal garden
Posted on | December 23, 2011 | No Comments
To harvest rain from your roof for the garden, first you have to catch it. This requires gutters. Gutters are by no means universal appurtenances. Some home styles, such as Craftsman, Spanish and Colonial lend themselves so happily to gutters that they usually come with them. The rolled metal amounts to jewelry around the eaves.
However, put the same gutters on a modern home and you have a problem. The handsomeness of the structure is often defined by the lines of the roof and eaves. Gutters look dumpy; downspouts amount to vandalism.
The upshot? To those of us who live in midcentury homes and want to practice water conservation, the question of whether or not to put up gutters can feel like a choice between looking good or being good.
Click here to keep reading part one on capturing rain in the Los Angeles Times and here for part two.
Ruben Ruiz, the sheet metal artist and gutter fabricator described in these pieces may be reached at:
ruizsheetmetal [@] gmail.com by removing the anti-spam brackets and closing the spaces.
The Dry Garden: Engineered to fail
Posted on | December 16, 2011 | No Comments
As the days of Occupy LA’s tenancy around City Hall Park became numbered last month, I wrote in the op-ed pages of this paper that the city should seize the opportunity to replace the trashed lawn with a model garden demonstrating state of the art storm water capture and drought tolerant planting. The Mar Vista Community Council immediately began a campaign to support it. The Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, California Native Plant Society and Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants each wrote the Department of Recreation and Parks calling for the city to seize the opportunity. But the most forceful argument came in the one-two punch of the November 30 windstorm swiftly followed by this week’s rain.
Click here to keep reading in The Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times about why floods follow winter windstorms and what this has to do with trees. For tips from some of the region’s leading arborists and urban foresters about how to prevent “tree failure,” click here. This piece, from late in 2006, looked at the challenges faced by the City of LA as it began its “million tree” program and the challenges of steadily renewing an aging urban canopy. Suffice it to say that the challenge of thinning over planted areas and planting barren ones have only intensified given the mixed results of the mayor’s program.
The Dry Garden: Into the tall grass, tentatively
Posted on | December 9, 2011 | No Comments
There is nothing lovelier than tall ornamental grasses, backlit and waving in a breeze. Even vacant lots can produce stands of car-crash-inducing beauty. So when gardeners hope to capture some of that lyrical action for their own homes, it’s logical to assume that all one need do is stop mowing the lawn. Alas, that would be wrong. Harnessing the tousled romance of ornamental grasses (and plants that look like these grasses) is so hard that even experienced horticulturists factor generous time and space for trial and error into their approaches before they have, in effect, allowed the right plant to do its stuff in the right place.
Click here to keep reading this week’s Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times on landscaping with native ornamental grasses.
Elden Hughes and Cadiz
Posted on | December 5, 2011 | 1 Comment
If it were possible to raise Elden Hughes from the dead, the release today of the draft environmental impact report on the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project would do it. A recipient of the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award for his work protecting California deserts, Hughes — who died on Sunday in Joshua Tree — was an integral part of the drive that in 2002 temporarily defeated a scheme by Cadiz, Inc to mine an ancient reserve of groundwater near the Mojave National Preserve.
For background on the Cadiz project, click here. To hear Hughes on KPCC’s Larry Mantle Show after the Cadiz project was revived in 2009, here. Do, while reading, be sure to click here for a fine obituary on Hughes by the LA Times’s Louis Sahagun.
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