When Jeanne Reutlinger moved to her Escondido home in 2019, the neglected front yard was full of weeds, baked by the sun, and car exhausts from the street. Three years later, Reutlinger’s vision and hard work for a natural low maintenance habitat created a pollinator’s paradise full of native plants. Her efforts won the 2022 City of Escondido’s Landscape Makeover Contest.
In case you missed the memo: Glossy green lawns fed by sprinklers arcing water into the sky just don’t work anymore in these days of lingering drought.
As the supply of water in reservoirs and wells continues to shrink around California, we need to change what and how we’re irrigating.
Public parks might arguably be good locations for large expanses of turf in Southern California’s low-rain climate, but around our houses?
As California enters yet another year of drought, cities and counties across the state implemented water restrictions in the hopes of reducing strain on the states water sources.
According to the state, banning the watering of non-functional lawns will save hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water a year.
When Maria Regalado Garcia tried to wash the dishes in her California home one recent morning, only a trickle of water emerged from the kitchen faucet. Other taps in her Tooleville house in rural Tulare County ran similarly dry.
The lack of water meant Garcia, 85, couldn’t brush her teeth properly or fill a swamp cooler that pumps out chilled air — a necessity with temperatures topping 100 degrees in her central California town. So Garcia fled to her granddaughter‘s home in Exeter, a few minutes away, to have a place cool enough to sleep.
A billboard in St. George urges residents to use less water — “Utah is in a drought.”
Other nearby billboards in Washington County advertise one of the largest outdoor swimming pools in the world and a soon-to-arrive luxury surfing community with three artificial lakes.
It certainly doesn’t feel like this arid city – hosting the nearby headwaters for two important tributaries to the Colorado River — is in a drought.
As the drought drags on, there is surging demand in Santa Clara County for rebates that pay you back for removing a water-thirsty lawn.
“I have so much more appreciation for the California native plants now,” said Julie Garrett, who re-landscaped her front yard in San Jose.
She used drought tolerant plants, and a patch of UC Verde buffalograss — a new alternative turf grass that can go long periods without water.
The Western U.S. saw wildfire season kick into high gear last week. As firefighting crews made progress toward containing a blaze in Yosemite National Park in California, another fire erupted near the Oregon border and quickly became the largest California wildfire of the year. Flames also tore through tens of thousands of acres in northern Montana and eastern Idaho.
On the other side of the country, in swampy but fire-free Washington, D.C., Democratic lawmakers were feeling the heat.
The state Supreme Court allowed local governments and conservation groups Monday to ask the state for further safety measures and environmental safeguards at the Oroville Dam despite federal authority to license the facility, where a breach and spill forced 188,000 people to evacuate their homes in 2017.
The ruling will not interrupt operations at the nation’s tallest dam, a 770-foot structure on the Feather River in Butte County. But the 5-2 decision enables California water officials to conduct additional review, under state environmental laws, of the dam and other federally regulated water projects.
Advanced purified water first flowed from Pure Water Oceanside on Dec. 30, 2021, making the site the first operational indirect potable reuse facility in San Diego County, Calif. The project treats the City of Oceanside’s wastewater flows and, after additional residence time in the ground and further treatment, will distribute the finished purified drinking water to city customers later this summer.
The $71 million project took eight years of planning and two years of construction during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Leasing for new oil and gas drilling on federal land in central California is temporarily blocked under a settlement announced Monday between the state and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
The deal, which still needs court approval, centers on more than 2,500 square miles (6,475 square kilometers) of land and subsurface mineral rights owned by the federal government in California’s Central Valley, a hub for oil and gas activity.
