California’s Drought and What To Do About It

...he desert planet Arakis in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. Not only will we be watering our lawns less, we’ll be drinking our own urine. Knife fights with a bikini clad Sting will break out and we’ll be trading our bikes for rides on the over-sized worms emerging from our compost bins. But I digress. Let’s cover what we’re doing at the Root Simple compound. We’ve expanded our drought tolerant plantings over the past few years. These plants use less wa...

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The Unintended Consequences of Water Conservation

...in California and, as a result, cities have instituted mandatory landscape watering restrictions and cut off irrigation to parks and other city properties. Lawns are brown and trees are dying. Back in May, two University of California Cooperative Extension horticulturalists, Donald Hodel and Dennis Pittenger issued a provocative position paper “9%: Perspective on the California drought and landscape water use” that argues that these restrictions h...

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Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands

...We’re especially fond of his method of hijacking street gutter runoff and directing it with a small improvised check dam into a dug out basin in the parkway. We’ve watched our neighbor’s lawn watering runoff for years and wondered if we could find a way to use that water. You can watch two videos showing Lancaster at work here. And a podcast here....

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Trees Susceptible to the Polyphagous Shot Hole Borer

...lack cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa)* 17. White Alder (Alnus rhombifolia)* 18.Titoki (Alectryon excelsus) 19. Engelmann Oak (Quercus engelmannii)* 20. Cork Oak (Quercus suber) 21. Valley oak (Quercus lobata)* 22. Coral tree (Erythrina corallodendon) 23. Blue palo verde (Parkinsonia floridum)* 24. Palo verde (Parkinsonia aculeata)* 25. Moreton Bay Chestnut (Castanospermum australe) 26. Brea (Cercidium sonorae) 27. Mesquite (Prosopis articulata)* 2...

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Mulch, mulch, mulch!

...erfect lawn. I know many happy kids who live in such yards. And as a kid myself, I preferred such spaces. I have no fond memories of grass. I do have strong memories of playing in wilder spaces–under trees, among boulders, in a rainy gutter, in the snow, at the beach. Lawn, for me, was always a suspicious place full of dangerous sprinkler heads and hidden dog poop. The one exception I will buy for lawn is as a good surface for babies and toddlers....

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