I came to Grants Pass in the fall of 1984. Water and sewer utility bills had $25 for base rates: $20 for water; $5 for sewer. Units were literally pennies on the dollar. Come July and August, our utility bill rose to just over $26. We had thunderstorms nearly every weekend in the summer of 1985.
I love thunderstorms, but I wondered: “Why only on weekends?” If it looked like rain and I didn’t water, it did not rain enough to make a difference. A Grants Pass gardening superstition was born; “If it looks like rain, and you don’t water, it won’t rain worth a darn.”
Sixteen years later, in Landscape Management class, I learned that most residents of Grants Pass didn’t have automatic sprinklers and watered only on the weekends. Our teacher also told us, “Sprinklers evaporate half of what they throw before it hits the ground--and evaporation is waste.”
But evaporation is not waste; it is the first step in the water cycle: evaporation; condensation; precipitation. Without enough sprinkler evaporation and transpiring plants, we get no rain in summer; the last three years excepted because Hunga Tonga threw 150 million tons of seawater into the stratosphere on January 15th, 2022. It’s still coming down.
11/5/25
Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Neighborhood and X
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Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener 541-955-9040 rycke@gardener.com
