Stop Charging Us for Watering

Honorable Mayor, Council, and Manager:

We don’t have to breathe smoke until winter.  I’m breathing in my yard a lot easier than downtown, because I use misters and sprinklers to keep the smoke down.  And I’m not even watering more than necessary to keep my yard alive and healthy.  I pay about $80 extra a month to do it.  We shouldn’t have to pay through the nose to maintain our yards.

Watering one’s property with sprinklers and misters benefits oneself and neighbors by cleaning and humidifying the air.  If enough people do it, we can even make rain.  An article in Science News tells us that farmers irrigating in California cause more rain in the Four Corners area and put more water in the Colorado River to water farms in the desert.

          This should not be surprising.  It’s just an illustration on a large scale of the water cycle we were taught as children.  It works on the local scale as well.  In our bowl of a valley, when we have a high pressure inversion, water can evaporate and cause thunderstorms in our valley, if we throw enough water in the air.  When we are not in inversion, it can blow upstream and fill the Rogue and Klamath Rivers with rain.

          We used to make rain, in the ‘80s, by watering our yards and farms.  We had thunderstorms nearly every week in ’85 and ’86 when I lived here.  A lot of creeks were running year-round then that are seasonal now.  What changed?  The way we charge for water.

          The provision of water is a properly a service, like sewer, not the sale of a commodity, like electricity.  The water we get from the river is essentially free; the service is cleaning and delivering it, and like sewer, is mostly overhead in plant and employees.

          Pricing it as a commodity has put us into a spiral of rising rates and dropping usage.  The city admitted this a few years back when asking for a rate increase.  The last time you raised rates, you raised the basic rate, which at least did not make matters worse.

          A few years ago, the city started charging for sewer based on winter water use rather than a flat rate per household.  The same could be done for water, rather than charging us extra for watering our yards.

          Please make this an emergency ordinance.  Let us put enough water in the air now to make rain that will fill our seasonal creeks again and put these fires out.

 Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 8/7/2013

We Can Make Rain

 A famous comedian said he was told that Las Vegas is at least a dry heat.  He retorted, “So is a match.”

          We don’t have to have such dry, smoky heat in Grants Pass.  An article in Science News shows us the way.  We can make it rain and maybe put out these forest fires around us:  http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/347691/description/Watering_fields_in_California_boosts_rainfall_in_Southwest.   “Farmers in California help make it rain in the American Southwest, a new computer simulation suggests. Water that evaporates from irrigated fields in California’s Central Valley travels to the Four Corners region, where it boosts summer rain and increases runoff to the Colorado River, researchers report online January 12 in Geophysical Research Letters….”

          

We in the River City should water like our lives depend on it, because they do, and so do farmers downwind and uphill of us in the Klamath basin.   This study is just a great illustration of the simple hydrological cycle we learned as children:  Water that falls on the ground from rain or irrigation evaporates or is transpired by plants; builds up into clouds, and falls as rain, part of which evaporates from the wet ground and thirsty plants.  More falls at higher, cooler elevations.

The more plants we grow, the more water we put in the air, because they suck it out of the soil efficiently.  That grass lawns take a lot of water is a good thing; please love and care for yours. Or plant a thirsty ground cover like creeping jenny or blue star creeper that you don’t have to mow.  

We live in a city on a river, from which we take our water.  We are relatively close to the ocean, from which our prevailing winds come, and they blow upriver.  The water that we throw into the air with sprinklers and misters cannot be wasted; we have plenty of it, and throwing it in the air makes more.  It’s so clean that you can grow pitcher plants in it.

It cleans the air where it runs and cools and humidifies the neighborhood.  It blows up river and falls as rain, filling our Rogue River and the Klamath.  It makes rain in Medford, a slightly higher elevation.  It can even make wet thunderstorms here, instead of dry lightning.  It can cycle several times in the course of moving east or even in our bowl of a valley, if we just throw enough water around.

We used to do just that in the mid-eighties, when the vast majority of us were still watering lawns, and the farms around us were being fully farmed and irrigated.  I remember wet thunderstorms nearly every week when I lived here in the summers of ’85 and ’86, rather than dry lightning and forest fires.

The farmers in the Klamath basin cannot use the Klamath River water because the Indians have claimed the salmon’s share; they are at the top of the river, not near the end.  We in the Rogue Valley can make rain for them, and for us.  Please water your yards, and spread the word.

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 8/7/2013

Join Garden Grants Pass in gardening classes at Greenwood and Schroeder Dog Parks.

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

Spring Weeds Are Easy to Pull

Commentary to the Grants Pass City Council, 3-20-2013.

Honorable Council, Mayor, and Manager,

The annual weeds that I brought for show and tell at the meeting this week were easy to find in your parking lot, and easy to pull.  The ground is moist, their stems are tough, and their roots are small, since their roots shrink as their flowers grow.

They are not easily killed or controlled by any other means, except in light, loose gravel or soil with a hula hoe.  Spraying spring weeds with glyphosate doesn’t kill them fast enough to stop seeding; usually they are already seeding by the time they are sprayed, so other chemicals fail to stop the next generation as well.  Cutting them only keeps them making seed below the cut.  Weed control is seed control; pull them before they make seed, and they won’t return to plague us next year.

Our city code forbids mature and seeding weeds.  Our City Charter demands that the Manager enforce all city codes, something that has not been done since probably the 1970’s.  Most of the weeds I showed you are fairly benign, not having burrs or tacks, nor flying on the wind.  But there are mature weeds seeding right now that are a distinct nuisance to neighbors, not just ugly and disorderly when seeded out.  These are the ones that should be enforced against first.  They are easiest to kill just before they become irritating or dangerous, as they flower.

 Groundsel and bitter cress in full bloom, in nugget bark on weed cloth

Young groundsel in nugget bark and shavings on weed cloth

 

For instance, there is groundsel, flying on the wind all over town.  It is an ugly miniature wild lettuce whose flowers never open completely, but nod half-opened until they make seed, when they straighten up and let it fly.  They have been spreading like crazy all over town the last two years.  They are easily pulled from soft soil.

 

Heron's bill on city property, NE corner of Brownell and Spruce

The other day, I saw a yard that was covered in nice nugget bark inside its chain-link fence, and covered with heron’s bill a foot high outside that fence along the street, gone to seed, not yet ripe.  Heron’s bill has seed pods shaped like the name until they ripen; then they split into two sharp burr seeds that catch in your pet’s fur and can drill themselves into its skin when they get wet.  It is easy to pull when the ground is moist.  This weed is all over town in neglected yards and portions of yards that the owners disown.

 

A portion of the entrance median at Reinhart Park where shrubs and ground covers still struggle amid the weeds.

The median in the entrance to the All Sports Park has been maintained by spraying for years, and it shows in the plentiful weeds there now, the missing ground cover and the missing bushes at the ends of the beds, killed out by fine bark and herbicide long ago.  It appears that none of your landscape contractors employ any weeders, despite their contracts and city code.

 

A closeup of the median with various weeds.

Leaves are the best defense against weeds, but your contractors generally clean up all the leaves and encourage weeds.  Now you need weeders to pull them.  Please start demanding that your contractors employ them.  And start telling our police to start policing and tell people maintain their properties to code.  It’s one law that can be enforced without a jail, if only you would ask us to obey it.  It will bring order to our city.

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

An idea on which attention is peculiarly concentrated is an idea which tends to realize itself.~Charles Baudouin