Conjoined Conspiracies: Saving Water; Blaming Carbon

It is hard not to notice a conspiracy when it has been staring you in the face for ten years.  I've been fighting two nonscience eco-fads for at least that long, and yet have only lately admitted that they are joined at the hip, one dependent on the other.  Saving water and trace gas warming, AKA global warming, AKA climate change, were both popularized in the '80s and both are pushed by the same people.  The former has provided supposed proof for the latter.

The goal of both eco-fads is a carbon tax. Saving water has dried out and heated up our world; this foreseeable result has been blamed on trace gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, measured in parts per million and billion, tiny fractions of the air, heating up and drying out our world.  Fights over water saving have been quietly suppressed; the fight over trace greenhouse gases and the push for a carbon tax has been noisy and very divisive.  The magician has been telling us to look at one hand, while the other was doing the trick.

We have already changed the climate twice, the first time by watering farms and cities with sprinklers between the '50s and the '80s.  The effect become noticeable in the '70s and '80s, but we didn't notice it then; we considered the resulting moisture, rain and coolness to be the norm.  Since the '80s, we have changed it back to dryer and hotter with water-saving water rates, rationing by price, in most of our cities, large and small.

Not that everyone promoting these fads was in on the conspiracy.  It makes great use of people who buy plausible-sounding theories that fall apart when one really thinks about them, and rate consultants and scientists who chase government and grant funding.  I bought into both fads in the '80s but was not alarmed; I didn't want to water and mow a lawn and welcomed global warming as stopping the next ice age.  Conservation is supposedly a good thing, and so we thought that conserving water was the thing to do, once it was brought up in a drought year.

Water-saving alarmists talked to city councils, cities talk to and copy each other; and states tend to follow their cities.  All over the industrialized world, cities started rationing water by price.  California cities led the way, raising water unit charges and lowering base rates to allow customers cheap access to water but making people pay through the nose to use it.  As those rates have been raised and keep rising, cities and their surrounding countryside have been drying out and burning in summer and even in winter in California, as weeds grow, seed out and dry out where green grass formerly dominated city landscapes.

I stopped believing in trace gas warming when I realized that the million in parts per million was being ignored and converted parts per million into percentages.  A large rise in a very small fraction is still a very small fraction.  The absolute amount of carbon dioxide may have increased 60% since the beginning of the industrial revolution.  But as a percentage of the atmosphere, it has increased only 0.012%, twelve thousandths of a percent, in that 250 years, which does not seem to be enough to appreciably warm the planet.  Nor have its proponents ever accounted for the fact that warming increases rotting, and carbon dioxide and methane are products of rot.  Are increased gases warming the air, or has warming increased these gases?

I've also noted the way that trace gas warming proponents dismiss, belittle, and vilify those who disagree with their theory.  They are not scientists; they are political activists, and even Science News writers, who would normally quote a scientist critic of a theory by name, do not in the case of trace gas warming, but they do push “climate change” wherever they can fit it into an article.  The more ignorant its proponents are of real science, the more they appeal to authority instead of answering objections.

And then there is Bill McKibben, one of its more famous proponents, being interviewed ten years ago on public radio, telling me, in answer to my pointing out the small fraction of CO2 and how little it has increased as a portion of the atmosphere, "Carbon dioxide is the difference between Venus in Mars!"  The host did not question that, and I was already cut off from answering.  But my daughter pointed out that the real difference is size and distance from the sun.  Both planets have a very similar proportion of CO2 in their atmospheres, 97% and 96%, very different from Earth at 0.04%.

It wasn't until after 2008 that I realized what a disaster water saving is, as properties in Grants Pass and other cities started going dry and creeks dried up in midsummer that used to run all year.  My water bill, already high, doubled when Grants Pass instituted tiered rates on single family homes in 2006, just before the recession started.  A couple of years later, city staff asked the Council to raise the base rate because water-saving tiered rates had worked too well and the city was having trouble paying the overhead.  Base and unit rates have continued to rise as use has decreased.

Rationing water by price has been disastrous for the poor, as most people prefer to live one or two to a house if they can afford it, while poorer people live many to a house to share expenses.  They not only cannot afford to garden their yards and grow food; they are socked in water and sewer bills for having more people in their house, while richer folks on small lots pay less per unit than poorer folks for their lesser use, thanks to low base and high unit prices.  Young families are hit especially hard, as children need more baths and laundry, dirty more dishes, and contribute no income.

Thousands of homes have burned in California in recent years as wildfires burn into cities that used to be safe.  Wildfire smoke has become the major pollutant in the west, with more fires smoking us every year and now burning through cities.  We have had wildfire disasters all over the Western world; Greece, Spain and Australia, where semi-desert "Mediterranean" climates have turned from garden spots to dry weedy messes, burning at a spark.

We have been told that only 2% of the water on Earth is fresh water, and that we must save it wherever we can, so it doesn't run out as our population grows.  They say that evaporation is waste and that sprinklers evaporate up to half of the water they throw, so we need to use drip and plant natives that need little water.  They said that lawns take more water and chemicals than other plants, which is not true, but lawns definitely need sprinklers. 

This is a war on sprinkler use, because sprinklers put a lot of water in the air, on plants and on the ground, and all of this evaporates and cools the area.  It has become a war on gardening and even farming, with people telling us how much water it takes to grow a single almond in California.  And yet the rich can use all they are willing to pay for, making inequality far more visible.

Fair Use, no copyright infringement intended.                    

But evaporation is not waste; it is the beginning of the water cycle.  It cools, humidifies and makes clouds and rain.  That 2% of Earth's water that runs off the land is constantly renewed by evaporation of salt water and fresh, condensing into clouds that shade us and precipitating fresh water as it rains.  The more we throw water in the air and all over plants and the ground, the more rain it can make.  Acting as though water is abundant makes it so, at least West of the Rockies.

Water is like money.  When people become afraid to use money, recessions and depressions happen and deepen.  When they become afraid to water, either because of price or supply, irrigation drought sets in, increasing the fear for the supply and making the drought worse.

Indeed, it is hard to waste water where we have water and sewer treatment plants and a good river.  Water that goes down the sewer is cleaned to drinking water standards and put back in the river.  Water that sinks into the ground renews the water table.  Water that is evaporated, transpired and breathed out makes clouds and rain.

It is even harder to waste irrigation water on the west side of the Rockies and other western mountain ranges on other continents.  The western edge of any continent tends to be dry because the eastern side of oceans are cold and create little evaporation, as water does not evaporate below 40 degrees F.  But we are blessed with clean, cold rivers that run into the prevailing western wind, which blows our evaporated irrigation water upstream and uphill, making rain to fill creeks and rivers, just like the drawings of the water cycle.  Water can make this circuit many times over a summer. Some of that water blows over the Rockies to the Great Plains and the Southwest, sharing water with other states.  Sprinkler-aided farming in the Great Plains moistens and cools summers in Chicago with clouds and rain.

Water is the most powerful force in our weather.  Water is the most abundant greenhouse gas, at 1%-4% of the air, and holds heat through the night and in winter by its sheer thermal mass and cloud blanketing.  You can feel the difference that water makes when it varies up to 400%.  A rainy or snowing winter day is warmer than a clear one, as heat escapes into space when it's clear, and heat is released as water vapor becomes liquid water, and more heat is released as water becomes ice.  It cools summer days by evaporation, cloud shading, fog, rain, and dew.  Water is the great moderator of our climate, and yet is involved in our biggest disasters, blizzards and hurricanes.

When "global warming" started, we were told that excess CO2 and methane would warm winters, higher latitudes and nights more than summers, the tropics, and days.  After 2000, "global warming" became "climate change," which had the twin vices of being both less specific and more frightening.  We were told that extreme weather was increasing, which it was.

Temperature extremes, heavy storms, flash floods and fires are symptoms of drought, of desert conditions prevailing as we returned our highly gardened cities in the dry West of every continent to semi-desert conditions, which are far more dangerous than real deserts, as semi-deserts grow a lot more weeds to dry out and burn.  Even hurricanes are strengthened, as less and warmer water flows from cities down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, warming it and revving up the storms that enter it, like Hurricane Michael.

Beavers made Western climes moister and rainier by building dams on creeks that make ponds that grow trees around them, slowing down creeks and allowing water to soak into the ground and grow the trees they eat.  They make ditches to transport wood from those trees to their ponds, which spreads the water further and grows more trees.  Trees transpire and make rain, which spreads the water further still.  When the trappers killed them for their fur, early in Western exploration, many of these places quickly became desert, and the ranchers and settlers that came after the trappers did not know what had been lost as tumbleweeds took over the West.

We, like beavers, make our own habitats and changed climates in our favor by building dams and using water for irrigation, and like the beaver, we didn't realize what we were doing when we were doing it.  But we can bring beavers back to the West, and we can talk to our city councils and bring back the kind of water rates that made gardening our cities possible, those that follow the normal business practice of charging less per unit the more units we buy.

Most of the cost of providing clean water is overhead, fixed costs: plant; people; maintenance, and debt service.  Very little of it is unit cost, which varies with the number of units cleaned and delivered: electricity for pumping; chemicals, and filters or filter cleaning.  This is what we were told by city staff when they asked the Council to raise the base rate to stabilize the plant finances after a few years of tiered rates cutting usage, which was supposed to pay the overhead.

When I first lived in Grants Pass for 2 years in the '80s, we paid $25 per month for water and sewer, combined.  The city was clean, green, and beautiful.  We had wet thunderstorms nearly every weekend over the summer of '85.  In '86, we had low snowpack in the mountains and drought was declared.  We were told not to water our lawns or wash cars.  We grew vegetables and fruit and suffered brown lawns equally.  We had 103 days of no rain that summer, and 98 the next, as the low snow drought continued and then passed.  And still, the ‘80s was a wet decade overall, because nearly everyone in dry climates was watering in summer when they could.

Remembering that decade, in 2013 I did a study of rainfall and temperatures in the Grants Pass zip code in summers that covered 1983-2012.  In the first decade, we had larger rain events in July and August than in June or September.  The following decade, that reversed as the base rate was lowered and unit prices introduced in the late ‘90s; the third decade, when tiered rates were introduced in 2006, reversed it further.  July and August rainfall dropped by 0.9 inches per decade as water unit rates rose and use dropped.  Both trends have continued, as prices rose and use dropped.

Monthly high temperatures rose with each decade along with water prices.  The base rate did not stay low but had to be raised repeatedly to continue to cover the overhead as we used less water.  Unit prices rose as well with the Consumer Price Index, as we all paid more individually to use less water collectively, from 82 cents top rate to $1.40, before the recent rate raises to start paying for a new water treatment plant. They are now $1.49 and set to rise 5% per year for 5 years.

We must demand that they put all the overhead back in the base rate and only unit cost in the unit price, both increased, not by the CPI, but by increased expenses.  This system creates the most stable plant finances and lowest rates and allows us to use the water we are paying for access to, for watering our cities and keeping them and the surrounding countryside safe from wildfire.

If talking to them fails, we can sue them.  Both Oregon and California law requires that any public entity, when setting rates for a service, must charge no more than the cost of providing that service to each customer, individually.  The customer is the household, not its residents. Paying for fixed costs with a fixed price and only marginal unit costs with a single unit rate pays exactly what it costs to provide each customer with all the water they want to use, at a rate that allows all of us to use as much as we want.

Email the Grants Pass City Council and Mayor: mayorcouncil@grantspassoregon.gov

A conspiracy for Planet Money: saving water

A residential property in Grants Pass.

Planet Money, you asked for conspiracy theories.  Mine is about the environmental fad of saving water, regardless of local conditions, supplies, or needs.  This started in the ‘80s, with people telling us that only 2% of the water on Earth is fresh, and we must therefore conserve it, that it is a precious resource.  It is not precious, it is vital to life and healthy living, and now it is overpriced by the unit in many, if not most, places in this country and around the world. 

Governments in the United States and throughout the world have taken it upon themselves to ration water by price, instituting low base rates and high unit prices, the opposite of previous water pricing, which was all base rate.  

California cities have led the way, with tiered pricing, charging more per unit for higher tiers of use, the opposite of normal business pricing. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/us/a-thirsty-california-puts-a-premium-on-excess-water-use.html?_r=0   

That practice has spread to Oregon, including my city of Grants Pass, encouraged by state officials.  High unit rates have spread to sewer rates, with units based on winter water use, putting downward pressure on household water use.   My sewer bill jumped from $20 to $40 when these unit rates were instituted, and this year it jumped to $75, because I had 7 people living in my house last winter.

It is a quiet war on irrigation and use of sprinklers particularly.  Their battle cry is “Evaporation is waste!”  My landscape management teacher, in 2000, told us that half of sprinkler water evaporates; evaporation is waste; we were due for a drought; and to sell customers on drip systems.  In my 18 years of gardening professionally, I did so for the first 10 and sooner and later lived to regret it.  Drip and all other water-saving irrigation devices are delicate and don’t water completely or well, which is their point.

The war on irrigation is a direct attack on gardening, and landscape maintenance codes have not been enforced well for 20 years, mainly due to the property bubble, filling city councils with bankers, speculators and developers, none of whom want to maintain properties at all, much less to code. Weeds grow, bloom and seed unchecked on many properties, making it harder for gardeners to maintain their own places.

The ignored collateral damage of all this water saving is the budgets and lives of the poor and middle class, who are provided cheap access to water with a low base rate but must pay through the nose to use it.  They can’t afford to water lawns, trees and shrubs, or grow food.  What good does it do to let us buy vegetable seeds with food stamps, if we can’t afford to grow them?  In the ‘80s, we paid only a base rate for water, and could use all we needed or wanted.

But if the poor can’t garden, then they won’t garden for you.  They’ll work fast food.  Those who would hire gardening help are finding that weeders are hard to find.  Grants Pass is dry, dusty, and prone to weed fires, where it used to be clean, green and well kept.  Even though poverty was high and wages were low in the ‘80s, we all lived more beautifully.

Evaporation is not waste; it is part of the water cycle.  It cools, humidifies and makes rain.  It is the easiest way to share water with neighbors and other localities downwind, and to make rain in and around the place it from which it evaporates.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/crop-irrigation-could-be-cooling-midwest 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/watering-fields-california-boosts-rainfall-southwest

Indeed, it is hard to waste water in a city with a good sewage system and a good river with a storage dam.  Water that goes down sewage pipes is cleaned to drinking water standards and returned to the river.  Irrigation water either goes into the ground, recharging the water table; into the air to make rain, or into and through the plants, and transpired to make rain.  Even the plants we grow eventually give up their water to the cycle.

We on West Coast who live near rivers are blessed with clean rivers running west, into the prevailing wind, which blows our water vapor uphill, where it condenses and rains, filling our creeks and rivers.  The more we use sprinklers, the more rain we make. 

When I read the above article about California water boosting rainfall in the Colorado River drainage, I did a study of rainfall and temperature in Grants Pass zip code, June-September, 1983-2012.

I lived here from late ’84 to ‘86, which, thanks to this fad, was probably the height of sprinkler irrigation in California and Oregon.  We had wet thunderstorms every weekend in midsummer, though not usually wet enough to skip watering.  We didn’t have many dry lightning storms that started fires and had no fires or smoke near Grants Pass.  Watching the local news, I saw that Medford had more and larger midsummer storms than Grants Pass, and Klamath Falls had more than Medford, which fits with each city in turn adding to the water in the air with sprinklers as it condenses and falls from blowing uphill from the west.

We had a drought in ‘86 and were told not to water lawns or wash cars.  Everyone suffered equally, and paid equally for water, and our slight suffering ended with the fall rains.  That year, we had 103 days without rain, because we weren't watering lawns.

My study showed that the first decade, 1983-1992, had larger top rain events in July and August than in June and September; 1993-2003 reversed that; and 2003-2013 reversed it further.  Highest monthly temperatures also tended to increase, but lowest lows also decreased.  The amount of midsummer rain dropped nearly an inch per month per decade.

Between 1987 and 2000, I lived in Arizona.  I saw the cooling effects of irrigation in their cotton and corn fields, 10 degrees cooler in the fields than up the road in Bullhead City.  I saw the thunderstorms, torrential rains and flash floods; cold nights and hot days; the tempering effect of humidity and rain during their monsoons; and even brush fires.  Fires, floods and weather and temperature extremes are common to deserts and droughts, not a consequence of a slowly warming climate.

We have changed the climate.  First we made it wetter and cooler between the 1960s and 1980s by widespread sprinkler irrigation, and then made it drier and hotter since the ‘80s by making water use too expensive, mainly in the cities.  The resulting drying and warming has been blamed on trace gases like CO2 and methane, measured in parts per million and billion, respectively.  The former has been ignored as natural variation, rather than looking at the role of water vapor, 1%-4% of the atmosphere, and the way we keep it wetter and cooler when we use sprinklers and work the water cycle.

Why would the enviro powers-that-be push this deceptive and absurd water-saving agenda?  To gain their goal of carbon taxes, their holy grail.  But the semi-desert cities in California, Oregon, Greece, Spain, Italy and Australia that were turned into gardens and then let dry out every summer are starting to burn up (even in winter in California and the Great Plains) from all the dry weeds that these water-saving policies have grown, along with the dry forests and grasslands around them.

The Weekly Weeder: Natural Weed Control

Notice the old leaves under the rose, and the 4 x 8 sand paths.

            Weeds are taking over neglected portions of our cities and countryside, making them ugly, disorderly and unsafe.  Flowering weeds are often ugly, always disorderly, and once they dry out, they are a fire hazard.  If not killed before going to seed, they spread themselves around; they are a nuisance that multiplies.  Whole city subdivisions have burned in recent decades, and some small towns as well. When weed codes are well enforced and properties are watered, cities don’t burn. 

          The most dangerous weeds are annuals and biennials that seed and dry out in a season.  They make many seeds, some of which can last for years in soil before they sprout or rot.  But their roots don’t need to be pulled to kill them.  All their top growth comes from their crowns, the part of the plant between the roots and the stems.  Cut them under their crowns or pull them when they are flowering before they go to seed and they are gone, but it can take years to control the seeds already in the ground

          You can cut them under their crowns with scissors or a knife, which is great for going after individual weeds, but is relatively slow.  Still, this is the best way to handle seeded puncture vine, a noxious weed that pops bike tires as well as sticking shoes and bare feet.  Cutting under crowns or pulling are the only ways to take weeds out selectively in lawns, beds and borders.

          You can also beat the crowns out of the soil wholesale with a string trimmer.  This works best when the plants are young and not yet seeded, and the soil is relatively soft.  It has to be repeated to catch newly sprouted annuals and re-growing perennials.  Done often and long enough, it can kill out perennials as well.  It is rather messy.  A hula hoe (AKA scuffle hoe and stirrup hoe) doesn’t throw stuff around.

          You can mulch with leaves, compost, wood chips or bark to smother small plants and stop seeds from sprouting.  Most very small seeds need a touch of sunlight to sprout, and nearly every newly sprouted plant can be easily smothered with 2 inches or more of dense mulch.  Avoid fine bark and bagged bark with fines; bark’s natural preservatives leach downward and kill soil life, but not plants. Larger barks do not kill soil, but ¾” bark and walk-on fir are dense enough at 2” deep.  Walk-on fir bark is most effective at staying put; ¾” floats away on slopes.

          Leaves are the most effective mulch, though some tend to blow around.  Leaves that last for a year, like oak and red maple, are most effective.  They dry quickly on the surface and make a lousy seed bed for whatever falls on them.  Leaves and compost also feed soil life, which makes the soil soft for pulling weeds and provides habitat for good (predator) bugs.

          Perennial weeds like blackberries can also be fire hazards and nuisances.  Cutting under or pulling their crowns is effective, but birds drop seeds in their droppings.  When it comes to weeding, constant vigilance and watering is the key.

 

Revised 12/10/2024.  Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

           

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

The Natural Gardener: February Gardening

          February in Grants Pass is when the garden and the gardener really start to wake up.  January has its snowdrops, but we don’t really care; it is too cold and dreary to draw us outside.  In February, sunny days get warm enough to make cold weather gear too warm by afternoon, and coax crocuses and daffodils to bloom.

Daffodils in oak leaf mulch for weed control.

February is the time to kill annual springweeds like bitter cress, heron’s bill, groundsel, foxtail and cheat before they bloom and spread; it has been since October, when they started to grow and some started to bloom.  Cut any annual weed under the crown and it will be gone; you can clear a lot of them quickly with gardening scissors or a knife. 

Winter is also time to cut and dig rampant perennials like violets that are in stasis until this month, when they will start to bloom in earnest, set seed and make the matter more urgent.  Cut blackberries back and dig out their crowns.  Dig excess raspberries, transplant them, and prune out dead canes.  You still have time to transplant trees, shrubs and perennials while roots grow before spring top growth begins.  Winter is the best time to do heavy tree pruning with a saw, but lopper work is better done in midsummer.  "Crown" your roses when their buds start to grow, cutting them to the hard crown at the base to stop black spot until fall.

It is also time to start new gardening beds with compost, edging the beds with 6-12” boulders, choosing rocks with flat bottoms from the pile at Copeland.  Leaves can be used in the fall, several inches to a foot thick.  But new beds can be started at any time of year with compost.  One can build compost beds in the heat of summer for summer vegetables and fall perennials, or in the depths of winter for winter and spring planting.  Two inches is good for ornamentals, but six inches will give them a better start and grow great vegetables. 

Compost needs to be covered with coarse mulch like walk-on fir or nugget bark to protect it, roots and seedlings from rain, wind, and drying sun.  Avoid using fine bark, which kills soil with its natural preservatives. 

Blueberries and azaleas don’t even like to be planted into plain soil; they do better set on top of the ground and surrounded by compost covering their roots; their fine, spongy roots will sink into the soil as the compost is worked in by worms.  The more general rule is that #1 pots and larger need to be planted in soil, or they will be left high and dry as the compost is worked in and rots, while 4” and smaller pots will sink into soil with the compost.

          Paths need to be controlled too.  Two inches of wood chips, walk-on fir or ¾ inch nugget bark, will stop most weeds for a season, but need to be refreshed yearly.  4 x 8 sand, ¼-1/8 inch sifted river sand available at Copeland, laid one inch deep, covers mud and makes it easy to hula-hoe and rake young weeds as the sand brings them up.  (It also is good for starting a lawn and covering its mud.)  It is also easy to clean 4 x 8 sand by blowing and raking the tree trash into the beds for mulch.  Some trees, like mimosa, demand it, as they drop sticky flowers half the summer, leaves in the fall, and seed pods all winter, none of which are easy to clean off bark or chips.

         

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

The Weekly Weeder: Dock taught me a lesson

          Dock taught me that my Landscape Maintenance teacher was wrong: taking a plant to the ground once a week does not eventually kill it, even when it is fairly small.  Sometimes, you just need a shovel. 

          The theory was that a plant, when all of the above-ground portion is gone, spends a week taking food out of the root, growing new leaves, before putting any food back into it.  This may or may not be true and would be hard to prove.  But in the case of dock, I pulled leaves off it for years and did not kill it.  The leaves break off the crown, just beneath the soil, and it is so slick that one cannot get a hold of it to pull the root.  Much the same happens with dandelions, but their crown is not so slick and can sometimes be pulled. 

I did find, however, that when dock is blooming, its flower stalk is strong enough to hold on to the root and pull the whole thing out, which is the case with many plants that put up multi-flowered seed stalks, because the root shrinks as the seed stalk grows.  This is also the case with many annual grasses, but not all of them equally.

I finally found that if one slides a shovel down next to a tap root and pulls back on it, it pops the root loose and one can pull it out easily without even removing the dirt from the ground.  So one can loosen the root, pull it, and press the dirt down without further disturbing the soil, and you don’t have to wait until it flowers.

Perennial runner grasses need to have their rhizomes dug out or loosened and pulled to get rid of the plant.  Such is the case with broadleaf rhizomes as well, such as oxalis, creeping jenny, and sheep sorrel, a smaller relative of dock.  Like dock, I found that just pulling the above-ground portions of these will never kill them, nor even stop them from spreading.  If the soil is loose enough, one can follow roots underground with one’s hands and pull them out.

The idea that one can kill weeds by taking their tops off once a week seemed to dictate that I should work on all properties once a week.  But many customers could not afford weekly service and many yards are too small to work a whole day once a week.  For a while, I worked half-days for small-yard customer, going from one to the next, which was too much running around.  I eventually settled on a working most yards every other week, and found that once a month in small yards was usually enough keep weeds from blooming and setting seed between visits most of the time.  But bad weather or sickness could delay service long enough for seeds to ripen and spread, so I generally do them bi-weekly as well, sometimes two in a day.

                             

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

The Weekly Weeder: Violets are pretty, weedy

          Violets are pretty, and one kind smells really nice.  I liked them for a long time, and tolerated them for way too long.  

          Trouble is, they are takeover artists, spreading by seed that pops a long ways, and growing slowly while growing roots that hold onto soil really well.  We have three kinds in my gardens:  the purple or pink flowered one that grows knee-high and has the lovely smell when they bloom; a white one with no scent and grows half as high; and a small purple-leafed one with no scent that gets bushy and wide when seeding out. 

          The excessive seeding is a real pain in bark paths, where one has to pull each plant separately once they get their true leaves.  Stirring the bark up might work when they are newly sprouted.  On 4 x 8 paths, they can be killed as seedlings or when still small with a hula hoe, but they have to be hand-pulled along edges up against the rock borders.

Scented violet blooming on a wall in the fall, showing its runners and leaf-curl fungus

The scented one and the white one often have a fungus in recent years that curls the leaves as they start growing throughout the summer.  It makes the plant ugly and never allows them to grow to full size, while restricting the number of flowers in the spring. 

Fungus-infected white violet in fall

It appeared during the years that our city was neglecting the pear orchard that we bought from Naumes, when a lot of fungal infections appeared around town that are still plaguing us long after the city leased the land to a nearby farmer in return for removing the diseased orchard.  Beet/spinach family plants are still growing a nasty leaf fungus that also infects dock and probably came from it in that weedy, diseased orchard, and some varieties of photinia and, of course, pears, caught the black spot that was killing the pear trees.

Purple-leaf violets, crowding out creeping Jenny in the shade

The small purple one spreads seedlings all over my bark and sand paths; the grown plants are occasionally stripped of leaves by slugs and snails; and they actually crowd out my creeping jenny in the shade.  The white one spreads by thick rhizomes as well as seed, gets big enough to stick out like a sore thumb in my creeping jenny, and can likewise crowd it out.

Being a perennial, violets have to have their roots loosened to pull them.  It’s not as easy as plants with a tap root; these roots are bushy.  Crazy snake worms make the soil really loose with their large castings and make pulling them easy where these worms overpopulate from lots of food and water.  But get a tool under the center and pry, and they will come out most of the time.  Their crown is relatively long and thick, especially where it grows through bark mulch, and you have to get the whole of it to kill the plant.  The finer roots probably don’t grow a new plant, but it is hard to be sure.  But I don’t chase fine roots.  I just keep weeding.

Your small yellow woodland violets don’t seem to take over; they are hard to keep alive in a garden at all.  Some plants are hard to tame.

                             

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

Weekly Weeder: Start stopping spring weeds now

Groundsel has yellow, nodding flowers and bitter cress has tiny white, erect flowers.

          Fall has barely started, but spring weeds are already growing.  Now through spring is the best time to kill them.  Cheat, foxtail, heron’s bill, groundsel, bitter cress, cleavers and many others can most easily be killed in the months before they start blooming.  The earlier you get to them, the easier it is.

Heron's Bill, starting to bloom in the spring.  It takes a lot of mulch to smother it at this point.

          You can kill them three ways: by smothering with mulch, preferably leaves; by pulling them out; or by cutting them below the crown, the point from which roots and leaves grow.

          Smothering with mulch saves you the most work in the long run, in the places where you can mulch.  Leaves, when spread 2” or more deep, can stop weeds that haven’t even started yet and those too small or too crowded to be worth individual attention.  Tiny seedlings can grow through a few layers of light fluffy weeds, but more than that can make them run out of food before they find the light.  Blocking sunlight on soil can stop seeds that need sun on soil from sprouting at all.  And leaves make a lousy seed bed for seeds that fall on top of them because they dry out quickly.

Leaves covered with pine needles, which hold them in place.

          But not all leaves are created equal.  Some are eaten by worms before fall is even over, some by spring, some stick around until midsummer, and some have to lie around decomposing for a year before even crazy snake worms will touch them.  (If you have no soil life because fine bark has killed it all, it may take a year or more for even soft leaves to go away, but that’s a subject for another column.) 

Fallen red maple leaves stopping groundsel and other weeds 

          Hard leaves, like oak, sycamore, sweet gum and magnolia, tend to be stiff and fluffy and take a few more layers to stop weeds from growing through.  Many medium and soft leaves lie flat and can stop weeds from sprouting with only a single layer, but will be gone before summer weed seeds start flying.   A mix of hard and soft leaves 2 inches or more deep will stop most small seeds and plants from growing, and feed and soften the soil to easily pull the ones that get through.  2 inches of leaves in the fall is enough to keep flowers and shrubs fed and happy, with loose, easy-to-weed soil that is protected from rain and sun.

A foot or more of leaves will grow big vegetables as they decompose.  For small seeds, spread an inch of compost on top and plant on it.  Large seeds and starts can be planted into the leaves without compost, allowing the leaves to stop weeds from sprouting on top. 

Cheat, blooming en masse, at the point when the roots are shrinking and it is again fairly easy to pull.

Annual grasses, large and small, are most easily pulled from 3 to 6 inches tall.  The longer they grow, the more roots they hold the soil with and the harder they are to pull.  Annuals cheat and foxtail are a lighter green and have a softer texture than perennial grasses, are often fuzzy, and grow in clumps, without runner roots.  As they send up seed stalks in the spring, they use up their roots and are more easily pulled, but time is then short to pull them all.

Most taproots are more easily pulled when the ground is wet, but some in rocky or very hard soil, or with soft stems, won’t pull and must be cut under the crowns.  This will stop most annual weeds and many perennials, but some perennial taproots, like dandelion, dock, and creeping oxalis, need the soil to be loosened with a tool and pulled eventually.  Some, like oriental poppies, can grow back from a root tip deep in the soil and take several years to get rid of completely.

                             

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

The Weekly Weeder: Chickweed for fall and winter food

          Fall is in a hurry this year, sending us cold, rainy weather on the equinox, and now a summer-ending rain system as October began.  It may warm up to the 80s this weekend, but maybe not, and it will probably be the last such warm spell until spring.  We are forecast to have a cold, snowy winter.

Chickweed en masse under locust trees by the Greenwood overlook.  This area got fenced in this year, but there is more not fenced further down the trail, where the city spread compost a few years ago.

          Chickweed has been growing in my watered garden for weeks.  Now that the rains have started in earnest, it will be sprouting in the dry areas down by the river, where it grows thick and lush, under the locust trees along the river trail behind the waste water treatment plant on Greenwood.  Locust drop small, soft leaves that chickweed can grow right through and they form rich soil to grow chickweed leaves up to an inch long and a half-inch wide, large and juicy enough for good salad, sandwich and boiled greens right up until they seed out heavily in the spring.  

The stems are soft and juicy and can be eaten along with the leaves.   I like to cut just the top two inches of the plant for eating, for minimum stem and best quality.

They often start flowering in late fall with small, multi-petalled starry white flowers which quickly make tiny seeds, but are still good eating until the weather warms in the spring and they get leggy with smaller leaves and lots of seed.  Their taste is mild and very green.

Chickweed being weedy on the Caveman Bridge a few years ago, growing in decomposed locust leaves.

When it gets too leggy and seedy for salads and sandwiches, it is time to transplant it to other places by grabbing a load of those seedy greens and spreading them where you want them to grow.  For good results, it should be an area of good soil for growing big plants, where leaves will not be lying too thick and heavy for them to sprout the following fall and winter.

          Chickweed is also good for eye medicine, being a mild source of boric acid.  Make a tea with the leaves and stems, let it cool, and drop it in the eyes.  I’ve cleared up many cases of pink eye and kitten eye infections with chickweed tea.  To keep it available year-round in your garden, where it is watered regularly, keep pulling the above-ground portion of the plant before it makes seed.  It will keep growing until it makes enough seed.  It tends to break off at ground level when one is pulling it, so ironically, the way to keep it in your garden all summer is to keep pulling it.  The way to get rid of it all summer is to let it seed out in the spring, or smother it with mulch, the easiest way to lose it entirely.

                             

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

What does active code enforcement look like? Letter to the City of Grants Pass

Honorable Public Servants,

I will come to the October 17th workshop if I can.  I have to make a living, so I may not be able to.  I will answer Councilor DeYoung's question about how to enforce property maintenance codes now.

What does active property maintenance enforcement look like?  It isn't a matter of "busting" anyone for a single piece of litter that has blown onto one's property--or been dropped by a passer-by.  All property codes are enforced with a 10-day written warning first, followed up on after 10 days have passed.  People generally obey an order from police when it is easy to do so. 

Regarding litter, Everett, Washington started enforcement with businesses in the mid-eighties.  A friend of ours found work cleaning up business properties shortly before I left for Grants Pass.  

In Grants Pass, I would make that businesses and vacant buildings and lots for the first 6 months.  During that period, police should start educating residents when called to their properties, pointing out that, besides violating city code, property neglect invites trespass, vandalism and burglary.  The city will, of course, train its officers on what weeds to notice, and get the Courier to inform people about the new enforcement and education measures, telling residents that they are next.

Old litter, that which is dirty, faded or slug-eaten, is a particular sign that nobody cares about a property.  So are lots of dirty cobwebs on the house and shrubbery, and flowering and seeding weeds.  (More about weeds later) 

So, any sight of litter (old or new), cobwebs or seeding weeds should bring on an oral warning from police: the property neglect lecture.  Once the city starts enforcing on residences, five examples of litter or targetted weeds should bring on a written warning with the 10-day deadline. Police can pass written warnings on to Community Service for follow-up, and enforcement if necessary.  It's pretty easy to clean up 5 things in 10 minutes, much less 10 days, and those people would be sensitized pay attention to their property.  

Large trash, like the dilapidated couch for which I was issued a written warning a few months ago, should be issued a warning on sight as a matter of course, not by complaint.  I wouldn't do away with putting good stuff out for free with a sign, a charming and useful custom I've seen only in Grants Pass, but obviously broken furniture should not be tolerated.

"5.12.060 Weeds and Noxious Growth. No owner or person in charge of any property may permit weeds or other noxious vegetation to grow upon their property. It is the duty of an owner or person in charge of property to cut down or to destroy noxious weeds or other vegetation from becoming unsightly, or from maturing or going to seed, or from becoming a fire hazard. Accumulated waste vegetation shall be disposed of in a manner so as not to create a fire hazard or spread vegetation to other properties.

"A noxious weed is a weed that has been designated by an agricultural authority as one injurious to agriculture or horticulture, natural habitats or ecosystems, or humans or livestock. They grow aggressively and multiply quickly without natural controls. They displace desirable plants and contribute significantly to the spread of wildfire. The State of Oregon has developed a specific list of plants considered noxious vegetation. (Ord. 2901 §10,1960) (Ord. 15-5641, 2015)"  Grants Pass Municipal Code

What kind of weeds should draw the attention of police?  Our code forbids noxious, ugly and/or fire hazard weeds from being allowed to mature, produce seed, or become a fire hazard.  But I would not dream of trying to enforce against all such weeds at once.  Four kinds stand out for immediate enforcement: fire hazards; sticker seeds and star thistle; windblown seeds; and standing weeds in pavements.  

Fire hazards start with cheat grass, foxtails and heron's bill, all of which also produce sticker seeds.  These should be killed and removed before they make seed.  Other large annual and biennial weeds, when growing en masse, are tinder as well and must at least be cut to 2".  Owners of vacant lots should be encouraged to plant good perennial pasture grasses and clovers, which are far more fire resistant than annual weeds.  These can be cut to 6 inches.

After heron's bill, cheat and foxtails in the spring comes summertime puncture vine: AKA goat head, bull thorn, caltrops, and my favorite, tack vine.  We have a large lot full on M Street at Milhouse, and it drapes over the curb at 1080 M, a warehouse for rent, and on the north side of M just west of the Parkway.  It's all over town, mainly on vacant lots, gravel parking lots, and business properties.  Most residents don't tolerate them on their properties once they know about them, but there is one on the SW corner of I and Alder who does.  He's been told; he's been reported twice to David Reeves, who is the only person I am allowed to complain to; the plants are still draping over the corner as they flower and drop seeds, and smaller plants growing along Alder.

El Nino gave us a break this year, rotting the tack seeds where water stood on the ground, and causing a fungus in the flowers of some plants that slowed seed production in early summer.  

There are weevils that attack the stems and seeds, sold at goatheads.com.  That large lot on M would be a great host property for them to multiply and spread out all over town.  The city should ask the landowner to buy weevils instead of spraying twice a year like they've done for years.  But generally, people need to be told to cut them under the crown, sweep up any seeds that have dropped; and throw plants and seeds into the trash, not yard waste bins or Southern Oregon Compost.  Not that composting wouldn't kill them, but the seeds that get loose on the way to the compost piles could be a pain.

When I lived here in the '80s, star thistle was way out of town on neglected farms.  Now it is all over town and spreading.  It needs to be cut near ground level (not 2-6 inches) to kill it, preferably before its flowers open.  Anything that grows back should be cut again, shorter.  It is an annual; it will die when cut below the crown, where the branching starts.

Windblown seeds make it harder for the neighbors to garden and are unslightly.  People let lawns go dry and die to save on watering and mowing, but a dead or dormant lawn grows windblown weeds that grow tall flowers faster than the watered lawn grew grass.  (This is one reason why we need to reform water rates to encourage irrigation.)  Police should warn about flowering false dandelions, mares tails and wild lettuce, even groundsel in spring, each preferably before their seeds ripen.  This is why our code specifies that weeds must be cut or killed to prevent them "from becoming mature or going to seed."  

Weeds growing in cracks in pavement not only are unsightly, but are addressed separately in 

"5.12.050 Weed, Grass, Snow and Ice Removal  A. No owner or person in charge of property, improved or unimproved, abutting on a public sidewalk or right of way adjacent to a public sidewalk may permit:...C. Weeds or grass from growing or remaining on the sidewalk for a period longer than two weeks or consisting of a length greater than 6 inches."  

Start with the standing weeds.  The next year, include the prostrate ones.  Clean pavements are critical to making a town look good, and to keep our storm water clean.  Yes, the snow and ice portions should also be enforced in their season.

Speaking of which, I discovered a code I hadn't seen before, perhaps because it is not with the other Nuisances: 

"5.36.030 Debris on Streets, Sidewalks or any other Public Way

"A. It shall be prohibited to track, drag, drop, place, cause or allow to be deposited in any manner any mud, dirt, gravel, rock or other such debris upon the surface of any street, sidewalk, public way or into any part of the public storm and surface water system without authorization from the City of Grants Pass.

"B. No material shall be washed or flushed into any part of the storm and surface water system, and any such action shall be an additional violation."

I still don't see anything that requires people to clean leaves off the street in front of their properties., which would complete the job of protecting our river water under the code.

Sincerely yours,

Rycke

"City Council acting against litter"

MADELINE SHANNON/The Daily Courier 

"City Council acting against litter" was the headline in the Daily Courier August 19th:  http://www.thedailycourier.com/articles/2016/08/19/community/news00001.txt.  The picture on the article showed a plastic cup in uncut dry grass, a perfect marriage of the twin problems of weeds and litter.

Despite the headline, no action was taken.  City Manager brought the issue to the Council for future consideration and presented a number of ways to fight litter.  Not one of them involved enforcing the present nuisance trash and weed codes against those in control of property.  Some of them involved the city paying for litter cleanup.

He did tell them that we have a $500 fine against people who drop litter.  At the September 7th meeting, I told the Council that a previous Council had reduced the fine for dogs running loose from $500 to $75 so the police would actually write tickets.  No cop wants to write a $500 ticket for a petty nuisance violation.

I also told them to drop the 20% admin fee on abatement of properties, because it is a disincentive to enforcement of the code before abatement becomes necessary.  Police should be warning residents and property owners about litter and weeds before the problem becomes overwhelming and a health or safety hazard; otherwise the city is just breeding health and safety hazards.  Every property that has to be abated is a failure of the City to enforce the code before it gets that bad, and it should not reward itself for such neglect.

Later, in matters from Council and Staff, Council President Dan DeYoung said that reducing the littering fine is a good idea.  City police Chief Bill Landis defended his Community Service Officers, saying that they had been doing numerous abatements, hauling out huge amounts of trash, and they'd asked the City for another $35,000 to do it.

At this week's meeting on the 21st, I will answer Chief Landis.  He doesn't get that the purpose of having a nuisance code and officers to enforce it is not to have city workers cleaning up and hauling out huge amounts of trash; it is to keep properties from getting to the point where the City has to do so.  

If the police have to ask for $35,000 more to abate properties, abatement is not profitable enough even to support itself, even with a 20% admin fee on top.  The people being targeted are too poor to pay for the cleanup or don't want to spend the money.  Big property owners with vacant land and big businesses get no enforcement or abatement, judging by the look of the city and where abatement notices are posted.

On the other hand, if police were trained to notice weeds and litter while answering calls, and warn property controllers of all sorts that they are violating  city code and how weeds and litter attract thieves and trespassers, passing such warnings on to Community Service code enforcement to follow up on, most people would clean up the nuisance without any further enforcement or need for abatement.  Most people will do what a uniformed officer tells them to do, if it is easily done.  It doesn't make the city any money, but it also doesn't cost anywhere near as much as abatement that never gets paid for.

Contact your City Councilor about having regular police actively enforcing our property maintenance nuisance codes anytime they see litter and/or seeding or flowering weeds.