Our little Mutual Water Company STILL hasn't really figured out what they're doing. But we have a LOT of water-wasters here, and I suspect they don't want to offend them.

Still -- the trend to Xeriscaping is spreading. Maybe, eventually, THOSE people will burn something or another in effigy on the deep green lawns of their wasteful neighbors.

My DH and I spent hours yesterday re-configuring our irrigation system. Good thing - we had to test various parts of it, and found 2 small leaks, so it was worth it. The free market is working - he went to the store to purchase another irrigation timer control thingy, and found one with advertising on it already that says "you can set it for specific days of the week to comply with your water district's new regulations"!

Jackie

Ingrid - shhhhhh....don't talk about it - don't want to jinks it!

Jackie

I'd be very surprised if it really took us out of drought status.

In CA, our whole water-distribution system is built around snowmelt. But El Nino rains are, typically WARM rain. They don't add to the snowpack, and in fact the warmer temperatures can contribute to early snowmelt. :-( And, unf. rain that falls on towns and streets and highways generally speaking goes into storm drains, and flows out to sea.

So, we are all going to have to be innovative about saving water.

After the last big El Nino, we re-configured things here, so that everything goes onto the hillside, and soaks in. And one thing El Nino rains will do is make the Teas and Chinas VERY happy. They will bloom through the winter, with plenty of moisture available to them, and go dormant in dry summer. Ain't Ma Nature grand?

Taking us right out of drought would sure be great. But I'm not holding my breath.

Ha! After hours & hours of programming, and my DH re-wiring stuff and even putting in some new pipes in the garden, last night was the first time our "new" system was supposed to go on. I did turn many parts of it to materially less water, so I wanted to see how that did. Also, I do not trust machines, so I had a sneaky feeling it would not work. Well, despite my Luddite tendencies, when I checked this morning it appeared that everything worked! There is one place where we appeared to have watered the sidewalk, which we will deal with today, but that is all. Now I have to wait and see if the plants agree with this new plan or not.

Jackie

Our system is really old. 12 stations on drip irrigation. Regular leaks and clogged emitters. Property is big and sometimes we lose each other, so we have walkie talkies. I remember the last communication from me to him. "Jim! We are watering the lower driveway!" So that is now fixed, but I just noticed we are watering the road where our freeway daisy and rosemary covered slope meets it. Another test is going to be on for today. We got a mandatory cut last year. We water on certain days. I hope we don't get another cut!

Suzi - "old"? We have two very small lawns (which continuously shrink in size as I plant beds around and in them) which still have 1930s sprinklers in them. They have been turned down, and some turned off, and run for WAY less time, but they are still there. In both cases those stations also run lots of tiny spray emitters and soaker hoses in the beds around the lawns. They do not have much grass anymore, actually. This is because of lots of shade. One of them has actually been taken over 50% by moss - if I had tried to grow a moss lawn I know it would not have worked! The other one has been taken over more than 50% by some sort of wild ground cover which blooms with tiny purple flowers in the Spring - it has very small, creeping green leaves which make a sort of mat. It looks much better than the part where there is still grass - Nature is amazing!

Jackie

I think the hardest part of using a drip system is that you really cant see how well it works if you have it under mulch. But I am always surprised at just how wet the soil can get.

We ended up deciding to take out fewer roses than I had originally planned - that starts later today. One bed will be removed altogether. I will reprogram the timers for longer intervals between watering which can save us 10% to 30%, depending on how long the intervals will be. I haven't put this year's mulch down yet. I'm waiting until after I make the changes. That should help, too.

Various parts of the Bay Area got between 75% and almost 100% of normal rainfall, so we are not yet hurting as badly as some other parts of the state. Of course we are all pulling from the same reservoirs for summer water. My fingers are crossed that El Niño will bring us all generous water this fall. And that the money we all voted for to improve our reservoirs will actually be used for that purpose. As yet, I have not read one word about that actually happening.

Did you see that Texas eliminated a 5 year drought with 3 weeks of non-stop rain? Of course, the whole state is literally under water, but when the floods subside they say that the drought is definitely over, and all of their lakes, etc, will be full. Hopefully CA can come out of our drought more gradually!

Jackie

I hope so, too, Jacqueline, though the rain hasn't fixed all of our drought problems, at least, not for central TX. According to the Lower Colorado River Authority, using data updated about 5 min ago, the Lake Austin & Lake Buchanan reservoirs that supply Austin are still only at 48% of capacity. That's about 10% higher than a month ago, but it's obviously not ideal.

The reason is that the area that feeds the Colorado River still ranges from "Abnormally Dry" to "Severe Drought," with the worst of the drought along a line from Llano to Fredericksberg to Kerrville. The rain that falls south of that region doesn't really help the water supply (for Austin).

http://hydromet.lcra.org/riverreport/ & http://hydromet.lcra.org/full.aspx

And this graphic was published in mid-May--I added an arrow to show where we are now (at 958K gallons in Lk A + Lk B) compared to the "Worse-than-drought-of-record" level.

(http://www.lcra.org/water/water-supply/drought-update/Documents/Highland-Lakes-Combined-Storage-Gauge-050115.pdf)

That said, it's been lovely in terms of local groundwater, springs, and creeks, so I'm certainly not complaining! I only worry that some folks in this state underestimate the complexity, severity, & longevity of the drought's effects. This year's rain has been delicious, lovely, wonderfulness (if, sometimes, a little too much wonderfulness), but the underlying problems of how we use water here and how we respond to a drying climate remain.

I'll step off the soapbox now...

Here's hoping El Niño brings y'all in California a glorious sopping-wet summer!

We never have wet summers - in NORMAL times it does not rain from May to Oct. We will settle for one of our normal wet winters.

Nope. I was a woman grown before I realized that in other parts of the U.S., people had summer rain. WHO KNEW!? Like Jackie -- I will settle happily for an El Nino winter ahead, to give us, if nothing else, a break from the drought.

Spent yesterday working on turning a part of the parkway lawn into bedding area for drought-tolerant plants (Gazanias will be the first occupants, later today). About two-thirds of the parkway lawn is now no longer lawn (a project I've been working on for about a decade--it's a larger effort than one might expect, as I'm on a corner, and so have double the parkway most people have). Unfortunately, the soil in that spot is the hardest on the whole property, truly concrete-like, so I still have some pick-and-shovel work ahead of me today. While I was at it yesterday, a neighbor came by talking about our new community water restrictions: 16% cut mandatory, "irrigation" (they never mention "watering" per se) only to take place on two specified days a week and only between 7 PM and 8 AM. She took this as having been implemented; but the water company site, which I checked afterwards, seems to be telling us that this is the proposal yet to be submitted for approval to whatever agency is involved, so not yet implemented. I e-mailed the water company for a clarification not only of this but also of what they meant by "irrigation," as in the past hand-watering has been exempt from time and day restrictions (not efficient or wise to try to water by hand at night!--for one thing, you can't see if there's overflow), and requesting that they amend their proposal to accommodate hand-watering properly.

Yes, I discovered that the only way to find out what the LEGAL water restrictions are is to look on the water district site, and then they were hard to find - I had to dig down several layers. Ignoring the chatty explanations I finally found the actual regulations. Weird. The reports in the Press are always what may happen in the future, or just plain wrong.

Ours had to do amendments to make it clear that you CAN water with hoses (with automatic shut off valves), any time, and that you CAN turn on your irrigation system to check/repair it. The fact that they had to do that made me sure that no one who was writing this stuff had a garden.

Jackie