DryStoneGarden

Patio with Laundry

My bloom day photo of what Daffodil Planter called ‘the vine with multi-colored blooms’ reminds me that I took a photo of it in full bloom back in May. We hang-dry our laundry for a variety of practical reasons — it doesn’t use fossil fuels (clothes driers account for 5.8% of residential energy use), line-dried clothing lasts longer, it makes sense in our climate, and, well, we don’t own a dryer — but also I sometimes like the look of it. I remember when I was in Italy I thought the laundry lines between the apartment buildings were very charming, and now looking at two shots of our patio this past spring, I prefer the one with the laundry.

Patio lacking Laundry

I know at least some garden bloggers use a line. Daffodil Planter said she has one. Townmouse has a variety of drying contraptions. It’s getting more fashionable, and there’s, of course, even a blog devoted to the topic. How fashionable is it? Seems like an opportunity to try out my slick new polling feature.

Composting toilet

A friend of mine once said that the stupidest thing our culture does is put our waste into clean water. I think there are some other serious contenders for that title, but she had a point, the current system is a wasteful solution, though it’s hard to see it changing any time soon. Grist has a long article about the humanure/composting toilet movement, part 3 of a 5 part series on human waste. Personally, I would chime in that I’ve used a variety of composting toilets–they’re fairly common in some of the more off-the-grid parts of Australia and New Zealand and at the backcountry campsites here in the states, the Little Yosemite Valley campground has the best one I’ve ever used–and that the good ones are not at all unpleasant. But I shower on my front porch, so I’m not sure how much weight my opinion has on this issue.

ryan 5/7

   

map of a compact community, walkability within 1 mile, from sightline.org

In the planning world, one mile is considered walkable and one quarter of a mile is the gold standard. WalkScore.com takes that standard and gives a rating from 1-100 for an address, giving high points for things like stores, libraries, and schools within a quarter mile and diminishing points for up to a mile. The ratings seem fairly accurate, my current address gets an 83, very walkable, while the house where I grew up gets a 27, very unwalkable. That matches with my experience at both places.
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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 owners for taking a hit for science.

ryan 1/2