A massive Willow still grows

 

The thicker the plants grow, the more they grow and the safer from fire you are.  Clover is the best ground cover, being a perennial that shares space well with other plants.

          A massive twisty willow still grows next to my pond.  With the hotter weather, it is sucking more water.  I have to keep a hose trickling into the pond, after I play catch-up by opening the valve fully first thing in the morning.  The rest of my yard is being watered by impact sprinklers as needed and misters running in the heat of the afternoon and through the night, when it spreads further. Our backyard is well watered; our front yard has not been watered enough and has to be supplemented. 

My daughter’s family of four lives with me.  I pay the mortgage; she pays the utilities and the escrow.  This month, she began getting worried about paying the “city services” bill, as our utility bill is now called.  She thinks we should cut back on water but can’t think of what to cut.  A watered yard with misters is cooler and safer than an unwatered yard.  We do a lot of laundry as well. We wash dishes once a day. 

People shouldn’t have to cut back on water’s comfort, safety and hygiene to pay the water and sewer bill. Nor should any other city service be on our utility bill. The only reason they are on it is so the city can charge whatever it takes to pay the utilities’ overhead, police and fire fighters, streets and sidewalks while avoiding votes on what used to be called taxes, not “fees.”

We, the people, are tired of this whole package of lies.  We are tired of poor and middle classes being unable to use all the water and sewer we need, while the upper classes just pay the bills and use all they want.  Our water and sewer plants belong to all citizens, not our administrators. 

We are angry about unequal pricing of water units and sewer being tied to our winter water use.  Sewer needs to go back to all base rates. We need equal unit pricing of real unit costs, not tiered rates if we own a single-family home or fees for living uphill or across the river.

We used to have a city where lower classes’ yards were not so easily distinguished from upper classes.  Our city was beautiful in the eighties.  We fear the day that our city burns for lack of irrigation.  My house will not burn.

 

7-15-26, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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To be posted on Facebook, Nextdoor and X.com

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040              rycke@gardener.com

Cities need to stay hydrated

 

            For National Drinking Water Week, our Public Works Director tells us on the City website, “Our bodies are made up of mostly water and we need to stay hydrated to stay healthy and function properly.”   The same can be said for other living things in our cities that thrive on sprinklers, life that is impoverished and dying where properties dry out over the summer, due to high unit rates imposed by our cities on our water use.  

            Water is the wealth of any ecosystem.  Watering stores water in surface soil and plants, to guard against fire.  Our animals, plants, and soils “need to stay hydrated to stay healthy and function properly.”   

            Like money, water must circulate to be abundant.  Drought is a water depression, not enough water in the air to make rain.  Sprinklers are efficient rain makers.  Half of the water they throw evaporates, which condensed into thunderheads in 1985 in Grants Pass and made nice, wet thunderstorms nearly every weekend, the first summer I lived here.  

            In 1986, we were told that we were in drought, and “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”  That summer, we went 103 days without rain.  Rationing water in a drought doesn’t help it; it makes it worse, by cutting a major source of evaporation, watering of lawns and transpiration from watered plants. 

Rationing water by price has made drought chronic, because watering is the biggest and easiest use of water to cut—and the most destructive to residents’ morale and real estate.  Dry lawns die; some trees and shrubs die with no irrigation.  Residents and landlords stop looking at their yards because they are ugly.  They feel bad because they are too poor to water their property.  They feel even worse when their neighborhood burns because of uncut weeds and little or no soil moisture.

Building water plants and watering our cities with cheap, clean water, paying our water system’s monthly bills with only base rates, made our weather increasingly moister and more moderate over fifty-plus years, and kept the price of using water low, so cheap we thought of it as free, so we could use it for any beneficial use.  We need to return to pricing our water to sell it, not to ration it.  

Clean water is not just for drinking and household use.   The first man the Lord God made was a gardener, the first woman, his helper.  Gardening, which includes lawns, is perhaps water’s highest and best use.  It reaches to the heavens and makes rain.

                       

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 4-20-2022 and the Josephine County Commissioners 4-27-22

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com

Council: A Restrained 4th of July

 

            Though we had no official fireworks show this year, the unofficial show of both legal and illegal fireworks in my neighborhood was surprisingly restrained.  It seems last year’s Almeda fires awoke many residents to the fire danger that has been building over decades of rationing water by rates and poor enforcement of our weed codes. 

This year, the City has certainly been keener to enforce our codes regarding seeding weeds, and to obey them as well.  I was delighted to see the railroad weeds cut, and to see seeding and dry weeds being cut almost every time they are called in. 

But we should not have to complain to enforce our weed and trash codes.  That was a job for police and fire until 2006.

            As I walk neighborhoods, putting flyers to “Contact our City Council and Manager” on doors, I have not been talking to many people.  But I am also giving gardening leaflets and these flyers to store clerks and others as prizes.  Nearly all agree that it would be good to reform our rates so everyone can afford to water their yards, protecting our city from fire.  “Protecting our city from fire” really strikes a nerve this year.

            We all know that water stops fire.  Green grass does not burn, and neither do most green plants, if they are kept watered.  After plants flower, go to seed and dry out, they burn hot and fast.  That is why we have a weed code that mandates cutting or killing weeds before they flower and go to seed.  

Fire danger is a major reason we built our water plant.  Before that, Grants Pass burned, as many cities did without pressurized water to put out fires and to water yards so fires don’t spread. 

            From the time we built a water plant until we started rationing water by rates in the ‘90s, the rates were kept as low and stable as possible, so residents could garden their city, and so pressurized water to fight fires would be as close as the nearest spigot or hydrant. 

            The city paid all the plant overhead with our monthly base charges and covered only unit costs with unit prices.  We paid for the water system with our monthly charge, and the water was nearly free, so everyone with a yard was free to garden and protect their neighborhood with water.  We must return to that rate system.

 

Speech to the City Council, 7-7-2021, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener       541-955-9040          rycke@gardener.com

Water Well and Wisely

 

            It is difficult to waste water by irrigating.  Water goes into the air, the ground or plants.  It evaporates into the air and can make clouds and rain, either in the area in which it is used or somewhere downwind and often uphill where it rains more easily, recharging creeks and rivers.  In the ground, it recharges the water table and often runs into rivers and creeks.  Or it goes into the plants and from there, into the air by transpiration if it isn’t used to build the plant. 

            But it is waste to consistently overwater.  Overwatering is hard on most plants.  If the soil is overfilled with water, it can rot roots.  Overwatering has caused landslides. 

Sodden lawns breed crane fly larvae who eat grass roots and cause brown patches.  This is often a result of poor lawn construction.  Putting fine clay sod on top of coarse soil without mixing the soil between the layers can cause a “perched” water table because coarse soil has less surface area than fine soil and passed water more slowly.  I have seen many sloped sod lawns that stay soaked from watering too often. Sloped clay can be watered several times in a night to get deep enough, then let it dry for a week.

Lawns and most plants don’t need to be watered more than once a week, about an inch per sprinkler position, regardless of how hot the weather is.  Find out how long it takes to put down an inch by putting a can or water gauge half-way between the sprinkler and the edge of its throw.  High heat shuts down photosynthesis in many plants.  Plants don’t grow their roots any deeper than they have to, so their roots will stay near the surface if the soil beneath is too wet.  A wet surface brings up weed seeds, while allowing the surface to dry out keeps most seeds from growing.

Frequent, shallow watering is just as hard on plants as overwatering; indeed, both cause wilting.  Roots cannot grow deep because the water doesn’t make it that far, and the soil dries fast.  Watering with soaker hoses is often shallow; so is watering by hand-held hose.  Sprinklers and timers work better.

My 0.23 acre yard is watered by moving hoses and sprinklers to the edge of previous watered spots, so it is really double-watered, as sprinklers never water evenly and this evens out the watering.  Automatic sprinklers systems are built to water from one sprinkler to the next, which does the same thing.

I was given a barberry bush for my June birthday once and planted it in a small bed.  The soil was dry to more than a shovel-depth, but the plants around the hole were happy.  That is what weekly deep watering can do.

7-5-2021, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener             541-955-9040             rycke@gardener.com