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drought
Mar 27, 2014 19:49:33 GMT -5
Post by nathanp on Mar 27, 2014 19:49:33 GMT -5
See, that's because you're building it all wrong. All you need is an army of laborers and a few centuries and you'll be all set. Seriously, I never cease to be amazed by what they built.
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drought
Mar 27, 2014 22:47:33 GMT -5
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Mar 27, 2014 22:47:33 GMT -5
What are you trying to accomplish and why? I'd like to grow an apricot tree in the desert. Apricot chosen because it seems to me to be the most drought-tolerant winter-hardy (USDA zone 4/5) fruit tree. A seep would be nice one of these days. Eventually it would be nice to collect water into a cistern for drinking... I'm still stewing about how to collect water without collecting even more sediment. I planted teparies, garbanzos, common beans, and peas a week ago along the swales. See if anything survives. I'd try winter wheat if I could get the timing right.
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drought
Mar 28, 2014 2:52:28 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Mar 28, 2014 2:52:28 GMT -5
If the swales are filling up with gravel, that means that the water is flowing very fast to get the gravel into suspension. Sounds like wadi with flash flooding. Geoff Lawton's done a bit of work with gabions in the Middle East. I poked around a bit looking for gabions/wadi and came across these folks - spate-irrigation.org/resource-documents/training-material/Maybe also bunds which are a type of floodwater harvesting to slow down and disperse the water. Maybe there's some bits in this material that you can kludge for your situation.
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drought
Mar 28, 2014 14:40:43 GMT -5
Post by steev on Mar 28, 2014 14:40:43 GMT -5
I've neglected to mention that the Sites Reservoir-to-be is the valley I pass through, going to the farm.
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drought
Mar 29, 2014 9:48:25 GMT -5
Post by flowerweaver on Mar 29, 2014 9:48:25 GMT -5
Joseph Lofthouse I think the problem in my part of the desert is there has never been a lot of biomass to generate topsoil, ever--it was a shallow sea creating limestone for a good part of its life. So when it rains there isn't much soil to catch. It's also why the river I live by has the state's highest pristine designation and you can clearly see to the bottom of a 15 foot swimming hole, there's no sediment to wash in, only gravel.
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drought
Mar 29, 2014 12:52:16 GMT -5
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Mar 29, 2014 12:52:16 GMT -5
MikeH: Thanks for the links. Lots of good reading and vocabulary terms there. My primary difficulty is that the area is so remote that I don't get out there enough. Here is a photo, during construction, of a gabion I built on bedrock in the largest arroyo: Another photo of the same gabion after one rainstorm. It filled to capacity collecting about 300 cubic feet of gravel. Other water slowing strategies collected about an additional 1000 cubic feet of gravel in this arroyo. I like collecting gravel in the arroyos: That preserves soil and offers the possibility eventually of creating some seeps as the water creeps out of the sediment and emerges along bedrock. Strategies as simple as placing a log on contour can collect a lot of gravel. flowerweaver: Not much biomass here either. I've basically got bedrock with a skiff of gravel that hasn't yet washed away. Here's what the soil looks like. The size of the rocks is what was large enough to not be carried off by the rain. This is a typical size... In some areas the rocks are fist sized, in other areas clay collects. Not much organic matter to be trapping rain.
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drought
Mar 30, 2014 21:13:40 GMT -5
Post by steev on Mar 30, 2014 21:13:40 GMT -5
And yet life occurs; anything that slows the water is a good thing, as is anything that grows/contributes organic matter; it's very synergistic, although too slow for industrial ag.
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drought
Mar 30, 2014 21:29:16 GMT -5
Post by flowerweaver on Mar 30, 2014 21:29:16 GMT -5
Too slow for today's society in general. No one builds great walls, pyramids, giant cathedrals, any project spanning centuries anymore...it's not just the lack of slaves, it's that we have become a people of instant gratification, and that's really what industrial ag is promising.
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drought
Mar 30, 2014 21:53:26 GMT -5
Post by 12540dumont on Mar 30, 2014 21:53:26 GMT -5
Now that's not fair. I'm planting trees. Not likely to see them in my lifetime. Joseph, I think you are on the right track. That's how they fixed our creek. I think if you make seeps, eventually you can collect water. And it if's falling water, gains some power from it too.
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drought
Mar 30, 2014 23:22:48 GMT -5
Post by steev on Mar 30, 2014 23:22:48 GMT -5
I think the notion that those ancient, or medieval, projects were built by slaves has been largely debunked; I think it's largely recognized that they were make-work to keep the peasantry busy when they weren't needed on the farms.
The Medieval cathedrals were perennially-available work for generations of skilled stone-masons, when they didn't have other patronage, for example.
The rise of Big Ag has decimated our population of rural peasantry, dependent on seasonal employment (working the fields after the Nile's floods recede, for instance), so we are faced with urban peasants all-too-unaccustomed to the idea of grunt labor. Welcome to the Roman Empire 200CE.
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drought
Apr 17, 2014 20:00:37 GMT -5
Post by 12540dumont on Apr 17, 2014 20:00:37 GMT -5
This is from the Washington Post
Portland Oregon dumps 32 million gallons of water because a teenager peed in it.
It took one teenager urinating in a reservoir for the city of Portland, Ore., to dump enough water to fill about 57 Olympic-size swimming pools, even though the water was deemed to be safe.
A 19-year-old man was spotted on camera urinating through a fence into the Mount Tabor Reservoir No. 5 in southeast Portland at 1 a.m. Wednesday, according to the Portland Water Bureau. In addition, another teenager he was with was able to climb the fence.
As a result, the bureau closed the reservoir (which can hold 50 million gallons of water) to test the water for any contamination. While test samples of the water came back clean Thursday, the bureau will still dump 38 million gallons of drinking water.
Seriously? Folks, come on, a bird flies over a reservoir, you think it holds it's bladder till it gets to the other side? Scientifically, how many PPM's of urine could possibly be in that water? I think they should have to send that water to me.
I guess no one told them that urine is sterile. And even the astronauts drank their own urine.
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Post by steev on Apr 17, 2014 20:38:39 GMT -5
First: a bird doesn't have a bladder, it has a cloaca (Latin for "sewer"), the same as Amphibians and Reptiles, so not only are the birds shitting into that reservoir, so are the frogs, salamanders, snakes, and turtles; don't even think about the fish, swimming in their own toilet. It's a wonder so few fishes are commonly called "crappie".
Second: barring a bladder infection or urethritis, that shit-for-brains won't likely leave a ring around the gene-pool because if his kidneys are passing any bacterium or virus, he's passing a lot more of his blood-plasma and won't long have the strength to walk to the reservoir, unless someone is dumb enough to give him a kidney.
Third: if they know he's 19, they know who he is; they should sentence him to drink that reservoir dry, pissing it into city park shrubbery, as community service, while wearing a scarlet "P".
Fourth: I may have to reconsider my opinion that Portland is a city of relatively high intelligence.
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drought
Apr 18, 2014 0:36:12 GMT -5
Post by RpR on Apr 18, 2014 0:36:12 GMT -5
This is from the Washington Post Portland Oregon dumps 32 million gallons of water because a teenager peed in it.It took one teenager urinating in a reservoir for the city of Portland, Ore., to dump enough water to fill about 57 Olympic-size swimming pools, even though the water was deemed to be safe. A 19-year-old man was spotted on camera urinating through a fence into the Mount Tabor Reservoir No. 5 in southeast Portland at 1 a.m. Wednesday, according to the Portland Water Bureau. In addition, another teenager he was with was able to climb the fence. As a result, the bureau closed the reservoir (which can hold 50 million gallons of water) to test the water for any contamination. While test samples of the water came back clean Thursday, the bureau will still dump 38 million gallons of drinking water. Seriously? Folks, come on, a bird flies over a reservoir, you think it holds it's bladder till it gets to the other side? Scientifically, how many PPM's of urine could possibly be in that water? I think they should have to send that water to me. I guess no one told them that urine is sterile. And even the astronauts drank their own urine. Now all know why the U.S. has become a rather pathetic shadow of what it once was. As one of the leading Democrats of the DNC said of voters during Clinton's first run for president: Americans are dumb as shit and getting dumber every day.
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drought
Apr 18, 2014 1:09:19 GMT -5
Post by steev on Apr 18, 2014 1:09:19 GMT -5
It's a damned shame, but it seems true.
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drought
Apr 18, 2014 8:40:56 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Apr 18, 2014 8:40:56 GMT -5
MikeH: Thanks for the links. Lots of good reading and vocabulary terms there. My primary difficulty is that the area is so remote that I don't get out there enough. Here is a photo, during construction, of a gabion I built on bedrock in the largest arroyo: If this is the only gabion in that arroyo, then it's not surprisingly that you're collecting gravel and other detritus. If you want to harvest gravel, that works but if you want to harvest/distribute water, it seems to me that you have to slow the water down which will keep the heavier detritus from entering into suspension. You'd probably still have to deal with silting up but silt might not be a bad thing to harvest. Depending on its origins, it could be a source of minerals for your soil. Positioning additional gabions would be critical. Some of the pictures I looked at in some of the links that I referenced showed erosion under and around the gabion because of the positioning of the gabion - it created small vortexes that turned into larger vortexes as erosion resulted. Getting the water to where you want it might require some degree of engineering. My limited experience with trying to stop erosion of our very sloped driveway during heavy downpours taught me that you can't build water diversion when it's not raining. You need running water to show you where to divert it. But when it's raining and the soil/gravel is moving, it's difficult to divert it using shovels full of soupy soil/gravel. An arroyo full of roaring water would be close to impossible to divert. A challenge to say the least. We're actually doing some water diversion right now. There's a culvert that empties out at the top of our property - we're on a hillside. It drains the hillside above us on the other side of the road. A few years ago we channeled, the water down into a small pond which has resulted in the top part of the property being fairly dry and drying out quickly. But the pond overflows when full. During spring runoff, it overflows fairly early and all the ground further down hill from it is impassably wet since the water weeps everywhere. In the past, we've intended to do something about it when it dried up but never gotten to it. This year we are because we're trying to work in the area where the weeping is occurring so it's a problem. So we're doing a bit of channeling to see if we can "collect" the dispersed water into one or two channels and direct it to a low area where it is already ending up. Everything is so wet that it won't dry things out but at least we'll see where the water wants to flow. Later this spring when it dries out we'll convert the channels into shallow swales and seed them to keep the soil from eroding when they take water. Next spring will be the test of how well it works. I think that we may also have to build up some areas of the paths because they collect ground water during the spring. We won't do any of that though until we see how the swales work.
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