DryStoneGarden

Or at least we should consider it normal.

Forum on KQED did an hour this morning on California’s water shortage. The Department of Water Resources has our precipitation at 70% and the snowpack at 50-70%, and we’re likely to have rationing this year. Wendy Martin, statewide coordinator drought coordinator for CDEC, talked about consulting with Australians about their drought. Australia is in their 10th year of drought, but they’ve decided to stop considering it a drought; they adjusted their baseline water expectations to consider their drought normal. They are a drought country, they realized, so they should expect drought. Anything extra should be considered gravy. She said the Australians were unimpressed with our California drought, because we still have turf. How could we be in a drought if we were still putting water into our lawns?

EBMUD and MMWD did a really good job last year with their invoices to get people thinking about their water usage. We noticed a big difference in people’s awareness, directly related to the information they read on their invoices. We’d never before had a client talk to us about the water bill, but last year almost every client did. MMWD has a rebate program that helps pay for the materials to improve water efficiency; they pay up to $350 for a single family house. It can be hard to spend money on irrigation, and have the landscape look essentially the same after the work is done, so the rebate checks make a big difference, not only by lowering the cost, but also by showing that the community appreciates the effort. Changing habits needs the carrot and the stick. This drought is a great opportunity to change how people think about water usage.

ryan 2/4

We went to a planting party in the Mission this weekend. I hadn’t noticed before, but many parts of San Francisco don’t have hellstrips, the strips of dirt between the sidewalk and the street. Whole neighborhoods are wall to wall concrete with only an occasional little cutout for a street tree. It’s not good; all that concrete causes various problems, especially with stormwater management. Stormwater has nowhere to infiltrate during a storm, so it ends up in the city sewer system where it sometimes overloads the system and causes sewage to dump into the streets and the bay. Yuck. Much better to have a hellstrip, which allows the water to infiltrate instead of running straight into the sewers.

Plantsf.org is a non-profit in the city that encourages and helps people to remove concrete and create planted areas on their streets. Their website has demonstration photos and information about the process; there’s a permit to apply for and grant money is sometimes available to help pay for materials. If I live in SF and had a sidewalk seven feet wide or wider, I would go to their website immediately.

Thirty different homes were getting plantings at the project we helped with, enough to to make a big difference in the neighborhood. A lot of volunteers showed up, the weather was great, and I got a free ice-cream cone.

ryan 1/14

  

sustainable sites native garden case study

Sustainable Sites Initiative has a collection of case studies that illustrate green building practices. The most interesting to us is Garden/Garden:A Comparison in Santa Monica, where the city installed a traditional front yard lawn garden and a low-water, native, sustainable design garden on adjacent lots so that people could see the side by side comparison. 

The native garden cost about one third more to install, $16,700 vs. $12,400; that cost difference came from the installation of a DG walkway to replace the existing concrete walkway and installation of rain gutters and a stormwater infiltration pit.

The native garden used 77% less water, 283,981 gallons/year vs. 64,396 gallons/year.

The native garden generated 66% less green waste, 219 pounds/year vs. 647.5 pounds/year.

The house and yard of the traditional garden look like relics from the sixties. I salute the homeowners for taking a hit for science.

ryan 1/2

You think double-paned glass is efficient? The Germans use triple.

NY Times writes about furnace-less houses popular in Frankfurt Germany. Super-insulated, airtight, and heated by passive solar, your appliances and your body, they are called Passive Houses. Architect Nabih Tahan has built one for his family here in Berkeley. His website explains how they are built and work.

They work best with 500 sq. ft./person or less. Not exactly a McMansion, but that’s double what we have now in our own single-paned, drafty bungalow.

ryan 12/29

Science Daily has a vein of articles about biochar, the concept of adding charcoal to soil to improve it’s fertility. I had previously read about biochar in a National Geographic article, Our Good Earth, with the term “terra preta” (black earth). Basically, the concept comes from patches of human-made dark fertile soil in the Amazon, where fertile soil is supposedly impossible to create. Hundreds of years ago, people added tons of charcoal to the soil, in some places up to six feet deep, and the soil is still fertile today, in the same conditions where modern agriculture can’t keep the soil fertile for five years. (more…)

I just calculated my eco-footprint on the Global Footprint Network website. This one has annoyingly small text and a goofy flash player, but I feel obligated to do these things when I come across them. It said I need 13.5 global acres to sustain my lifestyle.

I’ve done these quizzes a number of times over the years, and my footprint is much worse since I began landscaping. When I was leading trail crews, a quiz said I was equivalent to 3.5 Pakistanis and tied with an Italian. But now, as a landscaper I clock a lot of miles in a pickup truck, and my footprint comes out much higher. I took a carbon footprint quiz a few months ago that had me rated high until I reached the section where it took points off for planting trees and my score dropped back down into the Pakistani range. It might have been cheating to count trees that someone paid me to plant, but it made me feel better about the compromises that landscaping foists on me. 

Another calculator is at Safeclimate.net.

ryan 12/14