Three Myths About Living in California During the Drought

When I excitedly told my urban farming, super environmentalist, gray-water-reclamation-system-having friend that I was putting in a new gutter system with rain barrels I WAS SHOCKED. SHOCKED, I tell you. Because he said,

"I would put one in but it doesn't rain enough here."

I...what? What are you saying? What are you even talking about right now? We live in the same state. Do you really not know?

Oh god you really do not know. Oh, wow. Well, this is embarrassing, because listen:

Myth #1: California does not get enough rain for meaningful water reclamation. 

Okay, yes, GRANTED. This is a picture of California, and it looks bad. We are currently in one of the worst droughts in recorded history. We are in such a bad drought that ARIZONA is going to ship us some water. Arizona. That's the desert out east of Hollywood. I think the national plant might legit be a tumbleweed. You know what they have in Arizona? Signs that say "Turn off air conditioning for next 5 miles" because it's so hot there your car might explode. I'm extrapolating a little bit on that but I'm pretty sure spontaneous combustion is a recorded thing in Arizona. And they are giving us water. That's the kind of (dry) creek we're up right now. The brown areas on the map above bleed into reddish brown areas which are letting you know you may live in a place where trees are more likely to burst into flames that burn down your house than to shade you. It's dry here. Is what I'm saying.

So when the severe water restriction mandates went into effect this spring, I became hyper aware of all the places I might get water or recycle water or just use water more wisely--and then it rained, unexpectedly, a whole half inch. There were some spots along the side of my house where water was dripping, since, like most of the houses on my block, we don't have full roof gutters, just about ten feet protecting the entryway; so I threw some buckets and watering cans under the drips and then an empty trashcan under the biggest downspout. I thought I might collect a gallon or two altogether and get enough to water the tomatoes the next week.

I came back a few hours later and every bucket was overflowing along with my thirty gallon trashcan. 

I started getting excited and ran out to scramble up another empty trashcan. Since we'd let the lawn die and we'd started composting, the green waste trashcan was just sitting there empty. I stuck it under the downspout too. 

Filled to the top. 

WHAT THE HELL.

I watched sadly as the slow storm continued to pour off my roof, unchecked; I'd run out of containers to catch it with. Everything I owned that could hold water was holding water, down to the lids for the trash cans themselves, and still it was spilling out everywhere--all from a half inch of rain.

If I had big enough barrels, how much could I have actually caught?

The formula, says Arizona Waterwise, is the square footage of your roof x the amount of rain in inches x 0.623. So for example, for a 1000 square foot roof, a half inch of rain yields over 300 gallons of rainwater. In 2014-2015, the dry year that led us into this historic drought, San Diego still received around 9 inches of rain. That's over 5400 gallons of rain that could be collected just from one medium sized house even in the midst of a historic drought. To put it into perspective, you could water a 1000 square foot lawn for 9 weeks straight with that much water. If you include the 9 weeks of water your lawn got from being rained on, you end up with 4 and a half months that you don't need to water that lawn.

Now if you have a garden....

Myth #2 A Garden takes more water than a lawn

Are you serious right now? I can't tell if you're serious.

I've mentioned before that my neighbors are awkwardly involved in every thing I do in my garden (and chicken coop, and mini-coop construction shoppe) and one of them recently asked us "How are you managing to keep those vegetables watered when we we're not supposed to water more than once a week?"

You're worried about my garden when your yard looks like this?



While it's true that some parts of the garden have the same water requirements as the lawn (an inch a week) garden plants have some specific advantages over green lawns when it comes to reducing your water consumption.

• First of all, even with six raised beds and five fruit trees I don't even come CLOSE to filling up the entire space my lawn took up. While someday I hope to have expanded into the full lawn space I still won't use every bit of my square footage because of the extra space I have to give up to paths and the unused space between plants. For this year, even with all I have in the garden, I changed my water usage from over 10,000 gallons a week for my lawn to 175 gallons a week for my food garden.That means a single storm that drops even a half inch of water will cover my garden for two weeks, and with the rain itself and what I can collect in my barrels, a drought rainfall of 9" in a year will still cover me for 36 weeks out of the year--in other words, the entire growing season.
• Second, fruiting plants shade themselves. My squash vines grow super densely and they and my bean plants grow spade shaped umbrella leaves perfectly suited to shading their fruits. Tomato plants even when they're staked twine together and shade each other. They keep the ground from getting hot enough to let the water evaporate. 
• Mulching around garden plants retains water that can be released slowly into the ground over time, and reduces evaporation even more. I use cedar chips, pine needles, and dead leaves; anything that can protect the soil and will decompose and add nutrients back into the soil. While you *could* do this with a green lawn by letting the grass clippings fall back down into the lawn, it detracts from the bright green color and makes the lawn look dead--and since curb appeal is a huge reasons for having the lawn in the first place, using a mulch totally defeats the purpose. 

Myth #3 The upcoming El Nino Storm will end the drought

Even though scientists are calling this winter's coming storm a "Godzilla" El Nino, the biggest storm in about fifty years, it still will not be enough to end the drought. Warm waters off the coast may counteract some of the strength of the storms, lessening torrential rains to soaking showers. While that sounds good in terms of reducing the risk of floods, our groundwater reservoirs are so depleted they'd need several deep, heavy rains to even begin replacing the deficit. Because the waters in the Pacific are so warm, scientists also theorize that the storms may be too warm to deliver a good snowpack in the Sierra Mountains; and the warm weather system may push storms down into Southern California rather than the north.. Hooray for sunny San Diego, but most of the important water reservoirs that feed the state are in the north; and the Sierra snowpack is essential for a slow melting water supply that will eventually seep back into the groundwater reservoirs. 

If the warm temperature system doesn't diffuse the effect of El Nino, there's still the problem of getting all the water from the El Nino storms to stay on the ground long enough to soak back into the groundwater reservoirs, rather than flooding out to the sea. Our drought-stricken state hasn't planned for big enough man-made reservoirs and many will overflow in the first rains this winter, letting the water escape back to the sea before a slow release can let the water sink back into the groundwater caverns. This will be the case in the fields and neighborhoods as well if the storms are too strong; torrents will create floods that wash straight down our storm drains rather than seeping slowly back into the ground.

Finally, our historic water use has been robbing our groundwater and reservoirs at a far higher rate than any El Nino could realistically replenish. We are a desert state that inexplicably has bottled water companies robbing our crucial water sources (Nestle was recently found to be pumping water from the San Bernadino National Forest with little to no oversight from the National Forestry Service). The advent of green lawns in America in the 1800s, supplemented with the invention of the lawnmover, the rotary push lawnmover, the garden hose and the availability of grass seeds, finally trickled over to California with the construction of the suburbs in the 1940s; and the American Garden Club convinced new homeowners that it was not just their privilege but their duty to maintain a beautiful, healthy lawn--and no one took that to heart more than Southern California.We poured 10,000 gallons a week every week into those lawns, forgetting to turn off the the sprinklers during the rare rains, forgetting to fix broken sprinkler heads that spurted water or sent it flooding out into the street. We washed our cars every week and took long luxurious baths. Resource stricken countries like China who lack the soil to grow enough feed for their livestock...import it from California, stripping 100 billion gallons of water a year in the form of alfalfa from our own resource pool.

After even one century of flagrant water abuse like this, we'd need back to back to back years of El Nino storms to replenish the lakes and reservoirs and the groundwater. The historic El Nino in the 1950's that this year's storm system is being compared to only brought in about twice the average annual rainfall. (27" El Nino vs 12.5" average annual)

The days of acres of lush green lawns in Southern California are gone, but with properly installed gutters that can help you take advantage of every square foot of your roof and rain barrels that can help you contain as much of that water as possible, rainwater collection can make a food garden with no drought deficit a reality. Especially on El Nino years like this, don't we owe it to ourselves to take every advantage of a rare opportunity to stock up on our most precious resources?

...particularly when rainwater collection is so easy you can do it in heels.

It's All Easy When You Have Dry Socks

The last time a true, drought-ending El Nino storm swept through California, I was a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; the campus is vast and hilly and horribly prone to lake-like puddling, particularly if it rains for nine months straight, which it did that year. Cal Poly also simultaneously prides itself on having the highest General Ed requirements of any Cal State university in the system and at the same time has no hallways connecting any buildings of different disciplines. Which meant that even if you happened to be foolish enough to take a full course load that year (and I did) you would still need to leave your main college building to get to your general ed classes at least once, if not three times a day. I walked in the rain. A lot.

In my freshman year I had made some attempt to look cute at school but during that El Nino year I absolutely abandoned vanity. If you had to traverse between any two buildings across campus it was not about carrying an umbrella, it was about wading through puddles far deeper than any rain boots could protect you from, and I couldn't stand wet shoes, wet socks, wet jeans. I took to wearing shorts and trudging barefoot straight through the puddling thoroughfares, carrying my Birkenstocks, and wearing a huge tarp/poncho that had instructions on the tag for use as a tent. I was an enormous yellow entity of puddle slogging. With my tent/raincoat over my bulging backpack and my bare feet I looked like a monstrous chick-creature stalking the university waterways. 

At some point in this miserable year, my friend Sam said "It's still raining, huh? Welp, we shore need it." 

I just about lost my mind. 

"Are you crazy? I haven't been dry SINCE SEPTEMBER. I go home at night and take a hot shower just to thaw out and then still can't get dry. It takes me all night under arctic blankets to just warm my feet up and I think I've had the same sticky cold for about four months now. I've given up doing my hair since it just gets soaked or frizzes up or dries under my hood. I am cold and wet and to be frank I AM ALL DONE WITH THE RAIN." 

He kind of cringed.

"But we're in a drought."

Standing in my wet clothes with my wet hair and my wet feet, shivering in the damp, Vitamin D crazed from not seeing the sun for so long, "but we're in a drought" meant exactly zero to me. I think I may not have ever spoken to Sam again after that. It certainly lowered my opinion of his character. "Easy for you to say," I thought bitterly. "It's all so easy when you have dry socks."

These socks literally make me so happy I have tears in my eyes. 

In 1997 no one talked about the drought. Down in LA they had water rationing but we didn't, on the Central Coast, and more people were concerned about how dangerous the roads were for us meek two-lane highway drivers when we ventured out of the farmland into the big city freeways. Even though the area identified as agricultural, for the most part it was livestock, not farms, so people just bought hay when they couldn't pasture graze, and watered more when the cows and horses got hot. Drought meant the lake in town was low and stank more than usual, but no one swam there anyway when the Pacific Ocean was a 30 minutes drive away. What was a drought next to the inconvenience of wet feet, water damage, replacing windshield wipers, having to drive 25 because of the storms?

This morning though, I knew something had changed.

I woke, like the rest of San Diego, to the unfamiliar sound of thunder and flashes of lightning outside my window. I waited in the pre-dawn dimness, my ears straining, praying, hoping, longing for the sound that I was finally thrilled to hear--a few pitiful pit pit pit taps against the roof as a sprinkling of rain fell for five minutes. I ran outside this morning, hoping I'd maybe have caught a few drops in my upturned buckets, but there was not really even enough to wet the bottom of the pail. I was devastated, then quickly overjoyed when a fat, slow rain started to fall. I stood there in the rain, letting it soak my skin and my hair and my sweatshirt. I watched the fat drops splash up from the parched soil and pool on the geranium leaves. A little bit of rain accumulated in the bucket I'd been checking and I joyfully and carefully deposited it into my big rain barrel like a child. I held out my hands to the sky and caught the cool drops in my palms and thanked God, earnestly, sincerely, and with total gratitude, for rain. 

By the time I drove to lunch the rain had stopped, largely, and I wondered, worrying whether the few and far between drops that dotted my windshield would be enough to lay down an inch at least in my rain barrel, whether I might get enough to water the tomatoes for one day at least, whether the roses and the nasturtiums and the pollinator flowers might get enough to perk up and survive a few days longer until my day to water. At lunch, given the option to sit sensibly outside I eschewed it, driven by a hunger to be out in the elements; I couldn't bear to be inside on a day like this, with every leaf upturned to the sky and a hue far greener than should have been possible, with the flowers breathing and bobbing and dancing in the sprinkling rainfall. Our waitress seated us at a canvas umbrella-ed cafe table next to the garden while it drizzled and I watched with growing delight as the storm intensified, as it started to rain enough that people made it only a single bend down the garden pathway before turning around and returning to shelter. Lightning struck and thunder rumbled and the rain intensified. I thought of my rain barrel at home and imagined how the downpour was filling it, gallon by gallon, how my apocalyptic dead lawn might sprout a few tufts of grass for my chickens and force some snails and worms to the surface for my chickens to eat, and my heart swelled with happiness. When the canvas of our umbrella got soaked it started to drizzle lightly on the table but I still couldn't bear to go inside; a fine mist cooled my toasty cheddar cheese soup, set my bare arms to goosebumps, rain-slicked my patent leather bag but I stayed, delighted, until our poor waitress, her sopping blond hair bedraggled and soaked, asked us politely whether we might consider moving inside.

A year ago no one talked about the drought, though we were certainly in one. It had become a sort of perma-condition, a lackadaisical half-remembered thing for people to say to each other when they'd taken too long of a shower. "Stop wasting water, we're in a drought!" Yeah, okay. But we're always in a drought. Just like in 1997, those words really held no meaning for us, though our water tables were emptier than they'd been in hundreds of years. We kept watering our acres of green lawns daily, kept forgetting to turn off the automatic sprinklers when it rained, even the second and third day when it rained; we took hot steamy showers for hours on end, washed tiny loads of clothes, hosed down our driveways. Even as recently as May, when the numbers were coming in about the drought, the water rationing had become mandatory, and we started to realize we had green-lawned ourselves into what might be a fatal situation for our state, I heard weather people on the radio assuring commuters in the second hour of a very much needed rain, "Don't worry folks, the storm won't be with us much longer. We should be getting some sunshine for you in the next few hours."

That's what creatures of habits we were--in the worst, catastrophic drought in California history, with our water tables so low that the idea of drilling for groundwater seemed inevitable and with it, the sinking landscape of our state; with people screaming about the water costs of almonds versus cows versus avocados, our newscasters were still quick to assure us that 1/4" of rain wouldn't cause us to miss our afternoon Starbucks run. 

This morning, though, I knew something had changed. 

It's not just that all over my neighborhood I've seen not only dead lawns and (although I hate them) fake lawns and people ripping out their landscaping to put in drought tolerant plants if not concrete and paving stones...It's not just that people at the restaurant, despite having their garden walks ruined and their cafe bistro plans rained out were looking at the downpour with grins on their faces murmuring to each other, "This could end the drought. El Nino this year. It could end. The drought!" It's that miraculous creature, my Facebook feed, and today it was completely chock-a-block full of people delighted, overjoyed, and thrilled for the rain. Dogs woke up and were scared of the thunder, the 200,000 people downtown to celebrate the Gay Pride Festival got soaked during the worst of the storm, movie theaters and beaches were closed because of the lightning and everyone just rejoiced. If for no other reason than to stop hearing about the drought, to stop the inconvenience of the mandatory water rationing, to be able to somehow if only for a few days have a green lawn again, a city of three million people was united in gratitude. 

Happy people, also wearing dry socks. Coincidence?

A lot of people have been making a lot of noise about a myriad of issues that had led us to the drought, whether it be irresponsible water-bottling practices, urban water use, or the water costs of farming. We've been united in our desire to find out what the solution is, how we can stay in this beautiful state of ours. We've been united in our desire to be a part of that solution, whether it's something as small as taking shorter showers or as big as letting the lawn finally die. We've been united. Will we still be after a year of storms like these? The El Nino storms that are due to hit our coast this winter are supposed to be the biggest ones since those tarp-ponco inducing rains of 1997. Will we still be grateful and joyful and willing to dance in the rain? Will we be willing to keep making sacrifices even in the face of storms that flood our cities, will we be wise enough to know that even a year of storms will not be enough to totally refill the water tables after two hundred years of stripping them down for orange trees and Kardashian lawns? Will we still desire to effect change, so that in five years, ten, we won't find ourselves in this same place again?

I hope so. For myself, this morning I knew something had changed. This morning I saw rain as the life-giving nourishing miracle that it is. I saw green beans and butter lettuce and zinnias that would feed the neighborhood bees and grass, wonderful useless but deliciously green grass, and the slimy, wriggling worms and snails that would come oozing up like seedling heads to fill my chickens' bellies. I saw tomatoes and blueberries and strawberries and roses, no longer parched; I saw lemon trees finally able to bear fruit. This morning I saw rain like a farmer. 

In heels.