Dear Garden Coach: I am a new gardener who replaced a lawn with Mediterranean and native plants and have noticed some of the plants, such as a native purple sage and monkey flower, are losing their leaves. They are not dead. I see smaller leaves appearing. Do I need to water the plants more often?
A late-season surge of rain and snow melt made a bad year better for the Colorado River, but it wasn’t enough to lift Lake Mead out of record-low territory. The reservoir that supplies Boulder City’s water and 90 percent of the Las Vegas Valley’s drinking water bottomed out at 1,071.61 feet above sea level on July 1, its lowest level since May 1937, when the lake was filling for the first time behind a newly completed Hoover Dam.
Water is an economic imperative —yet clean water supplies are diminishing around the world. Every day we hear reports of water crises—from California, to Brazil, to India, and to South Africa. Just last week for example, the UN stated that 23 million farmers are in need of urgent assistance in drought-stricken Southern Africa.
NASA satellite data has shown that the world’s largest underground aquifers are being depleted at alarming rates. Climate change, water pollution and exploding population growth will add further pressure on freshwater resources.
The Pajaro Valley, in southern Santa Cruz County close to Monterey Bay, is ground zero for high-value farm crops such as arugula, strawberries and cane berries. The area depends almost entirely on groundwater and is not connected to any intrastate transfers, so it has to rely only on local water resources.
The valley’s farms, residents and commercial businesses draw about 56,000 acre-feet (69 million cubic meters) of water each year, and 98 percent of it comes from the groundwater basin, with the balance from surface water and recycled water.
Pushing a wheelbarrow filled with 350,000 petition signatures, concerned Californians gathered outside the capitol Tuesday to urge Gov. Brown and the California Water Resources Control Board to stop the potentially dangerous practice of using wastewater from oil drilling to irrigate California’s crops.
The wastewater, sold by Chevron and California Resources Corporation, is now being used to irrigate more than 90,000 acres in the Cawelo Irrigation District and the North Kern Water Management District and is slated to expand in the near future to other districts.
Rafaela Tijerina first met la señora at a school in the town of Lost Hills, deep in the farm country of California’s Central Valley. They were both there for a school board meeting, and the superintendent had failed to show up. Tijerina, a 74-year-old former cotton picker and veteran school board member, apologized for the superintendent—he must have had another important meeting—and for the fact that her own voice was faint; she had cancer.
A judge on Tuesday refused the Oakdale Irrigation District’s request to throw out a lawsuit challenging the district’s stalled fallowing program.
Another judge had ruled in May that the district must study how shipping river water elsewhere might affect the groundwater table here, before allowing farmers to idle some land and sell freed-up water to outside buyers. When that judge, William Mayhew, was removed from the case, OID tried to persuade Stanislaus Superior Court Judge Roger Beauchesne to toss out the lawsuit, but had no better luck Tuesday.
The Widely Used quote, “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over,” often attributed to Mark Twain, has been used by politicians from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Dianne Feinstein to describe California’s battles over water rights. The quote itself may in fact bebogus, but it does illustrate why water rights are a difficult, but critical, topic in California.
Whether growing along the rim of the Grand Canyon or living in the mist with California’s coastal redwoods, Douglas fir trees are consistently sensitive to drought conditions that occur throughout the species’ range in the United States, according to a study led by a researcher at UC Davis. The study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides direct evidence of the negative impact of water stress on forest ecosystems. It also pinpointed which conditions are causing low growth among Douglas fir trees.
The first fin whale appeared in Marmot Bay, where the sea curls a crooked finger around Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A biologist spied the calf drifting on its side, as if at play. Seawater flushed in and out of its open jaws. Spray washed over its slack pink tongue. Death, even the gruesome kind, is usually too familiar to spark alarm in the wild north. But late the next morning, the start of Memorial Day weekend, passengers aboard the ferry Kennicott spotted another whale bobbing nearby. Her blubber was thick. She looked healthy. But she was dead too.
