Desert Disaster June 17 2024

Today it looks like it will get to 108 degrees F where I live. I’m not proud of this but I’m going to share what I did this morning because I make a lot of mistakes, but if I can learn from them then it is worth it. If I just keep repeating the mistakes then thats just no good. Well I hadn’t been in my backyard for a couple days. I tend to have days where I have a lot of energy and some days where I have none, and in the middle of the summer unless I get out at night or at some other reasonable time, it’s just too hot to do any work outside. I went outside this morning and saw that the pond was lower than I have ever seen it. I keep it as covered as I can to reduce evaporation, and I had azolla growing over the top but it all died in this heat and I have to reevaluate whether this pond is worth keeping going.

Anyways I went out early this morning and saw the pond so I turned the water on to fill it and went on to do something else. This is the first time this has happened while filling the pond, but I forgot to come back in time and I went inside. I was about to leave as a matter of fact when it hit me: the pond! I went outside and it was overflowing and had flooded out like 10 feet or so. I didn’t see any fish that got out but I felt so bad about wasting that water. I have plenty of plants that would have loved to have that water, but I am trying to grow on as little water as possible.

So I really want to work on automating everything. The technology to build my own automated gardening system with every sensor you could ask for are so small and cheap these days that it is crazy to depend on my unpredictable moon and energy level to keep the gardens alive. I have a type of hugelkultur I made that never looks like it needs water. I do give it a deep water every now and then but I could proabably water it even less and it will still do fine because it is a monster right now. I want to start keeping better track of what I do like one would do in a research project. I have taken a lot of science classes and learned a lot of skills. I am very interested in soil microscopy, soil science, and building living soil.

Even though many people would think of where I live as one of the harder places to grow plants, and they are right, it is also a fact that there has been agriculture in this valley longer than any other place in north america, for 4200 years! So people have obviously seen this as a great place to live for some reason. A big part of our problem is our water management. The city is mostly designed to just funnel as much water away from houses and into the streets, down particular streets and washes (which is what we call a dry riverbed that tends to flow once a year during monsoon season.) This causes most of the water to evaporate since it does not allow the water to sink into the soil. Therefore we are not recharging our underground aquifers and also we are obviously not making good use of this water.

Brad Lancaster is a guy who lives in my city who has written some books on rainwater harvesting and I bough them as soon as we bought our house. I have been watching the water whenever it rains and doing some manual landworks to influence the flow of the water so as little as possible leaves my property. I have just started, and monsoons are coming up, but I definitely will be capturing much more water than last monsoon. After doing the math, on an average year of about 11 inches of rain, capturing rainwater through both active and passive means, we can generally take care of all of our needs without having to suppliment with tap water, which comes thousands of miles away from the Colorando River and is water that is greatly needed in many places. If we can manage our water better then at least we won’t be taking as much or any water from the poor Colorado River.

So back to automation. I have quite a few pieces and some raspberry pi’s and I am working on my Python programming so that I can work on automating as much as possible, eventually everything, because I am an unreliable steward and in this environment, forgetting just one time can mean either a huge waste of water or a completely lost garden. Many people will never want to garden again after one of these events. It is my intention to develop some systems for myself first and once I get better at it I can help others get automation going in their gardens.