Show us your aerial/sat photo!

[Joseph Lofthouse]

The badlands are where I practice water harvesting techniques, and wildcraft seeds. There's lots of pinion nuts there, if I could figure out how to harvest them. I suppose make dens for packrats and let them do the harvesting.

Badlands swale shows up on satellite imagery. I think it's wonderful they imaged right after a rain, so water was still in the swale.


A check-dam in a ravine. It collected 6 feet of sediment during the first runoff event.


Desert research station.

[farmermike]

Cool idea, toomanyirons. It's really interesting to see everyone's growing areas.

Here is my home garden, on a 1/3 acre lot.
The areas outlined in green are vegetable gardens totaling ~1500sqft.
We've been here around 2.5 years. The property already had mature apple, plum, fig, mulberry, and orange trees. There are also prickly pears, grapes, a large black walnut, and a huge redwood tree. I've been planting new fruits and berries since we moved in, including several avocados.
In the lower left corner of the yard, I'm planning to prune the walnut tree way back, and remove a plum that gives very inferior fruit, so that I can expand the vegetable gardens.


This is the educational ranch where I work as facilities director.
The green line roughly traces the perimeter of the property. It is mosty steep hilly grassland.


Only the bottom of the valley has an mellow enough slope to be usable for building or planting.
On the left is a terraced food forest full of fruit trees I planted about 5 years ago. On the right is an orchard we planted 3 years ago. Voles have taken a huge toll on those trees the past 2 years; we've lost at least 50 trees so far. A steep south facing slope was probably not the best location for the orchard.
Near the middle is the teaching garden where classes of children get to learn about gardening. The paddock garden is where I plant large plots of corn and watermelons.
Last year we lost probably 90% of all our produce due to voles. It was devastating to watch; this must be what a plague of locusts feels like. The acorns and black walnuts here ripened late enough that voles didn't get them.
Fortunately, it really seemed like the vole population crashed back in the fall, so I'm optimistic about 2018.


This is a 1.5 acre vacant lot my parents purchased around 2 years ago. They are hoping to break ground on a house soon. In the mean time they let me plant a small field of corn and beans last summer. There are voles here too, but nothing like at the ranch.
This property has an interesting history. An original house was built here in the 1850s by John and Louisiana Strentzel. He was immigrant from Poland who came to CA by wagon train from east Texas, through El Paso, and San Diego, before finally settling in Martinez. They were the in-laws of John Muir. The Strentzels built themselves a bigger house (now the John Muir National Historic Site) in the 1880s, and John Muir and his family lived on this property from 1882-1890. Sadly, the original house burned down in the 1990s.
There are several 250+ year old oak trees on the property, and I am tickled to think that John Muir himself may have sat under them long ago.

[steev]

joseph: Is that the one you built?

Seems like water runoff is a big thing where you are; apparently infrequent heavy rain shifts organic-poor (not knitted) rocky soil down-slope easily. Looks like a lot of grunt work needs to happen to hold the water, building barriers; is there any hope of enlisting your community in improving their own environment? You go to the farmer's market; can you slowly chat people up to willingness to do some work on the commons?

farmermike: voles, really? Voles are obligate carnivores; they don't mess with plants aside from shallow soil disturbance (and will starve to death if offered only plants); I'm not even aware of any voles in Cali. You may have conflated them with gophers (I've said I'm a zoologist; gophers are the spawn of Hell).

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Yes, steev: It might be years between runoff events, but when one happens, it's as much about moving the whole mountain down-slope as it is about water moving. The badlands site is way out in the boonies. Even further than that! I'm not very good at recruiting help. But I'm getting lots better at knowing what kind of grunt work is most effective at holding soil/water from running away at the first chance.

I built the wire check-dam. I consider it the easiest, most effective check dam that I've built. I want to do more like that. Recently I have been throwing the fire-break prunings into the ravines. I'm thinking that will be effective. Might be more so if I could get some wire out there and tie them together, and to the ground or trees.

I spent a few hours building the wire fencing checkdam. I spent three days building a rock-filled gabion.

Rock filled gabion.


Closeup of gabion.


I do a lot of loose-rock check-dams. This one catches about 2 feet of sediment. I add to them a little bit at a time when I get out there.

[richardw]

Jan 26, 2018 23:50:41 GMT -5 toomanyirons said:

richardw - are they piles of lime or gypsum?

Getting warmer .. in fact bloody hot, its lime chip that is used to line the lane ways where the cows walk to and fro from the milking shed and paddocks, its to help wear there hoofs otherwise having to spend everyday on soft soil means the hoofs overgrow.

[richardw]

The educational ranch looks an interesting setup farmermike, what's the rainfall per year?

[steev]

joseph: While it's, of course, a lot of work to improve the commons, what work could be more meaningful? Assuming dipshits don't come in to "privatize" it, of course. It's remarkable how much effort people will piss away in gyms, when they could actually improve their environment with that work. It's difficult to mobilize people to anything, much less to something that has only long-term benefits, possibly not to them personally. Feh. I'm an old guy; those who come after me can go to hell in their own way, stupid bastards though I may think them.

[farmermike]

Jan 27, 2018 0:52:26 GMT -5 steev said:

farmermike: voles, really? Voles are obligate carnivores; they don't mess with plants aside from shallow soil disturbance (and will starve to death if offered only plants); I'm not even aware of any voles in Cali. You may have conflated them with gophers (I've said I'm a zoologist; gophers are the spawn of Hell).

Moles are carnivores. The California Vole is an herbivore. Typically they eat mainly grasses, but their population has boom and bust cycles. During the booms their diet include other things, like fruits, vegetables and tree bark.

We have gopher problems too, but they're more continuous, and never get as overwhelming as the voles during a boom year. Of course, in typical (bust) years voles do very little damage in the garden...at least around here.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

toomanyirons:

Water out here in the desert makes all the difference in what will grow. I would call the natural state of the valley that hosts my farm a dry steppe. The natural vegetation tends towards seasonal grasses and forbes, with sagebrush being the climax species. I often call that "wildlands" in my writing. What I call "badlands" is more of a true desert. The wildlands get about 15" of rain per year, the badlands about 10".

Our irrigation systems are designed to apply an additional 12" of water during a growing season. In my village, the irrigation water is stream flow derived from snow melt. The nearby mountains receive up to 60" of water per year, which provides irrigation and drinking water via gravity. My village stores irrigation water in a reservoir, so that it is available during mid-summer when stream flows can be low.

My experiments with water capture in the desert are mostly to see what can be done in an area with so little water. Sometimes water flows over the ground, but it does so as a rushing torrent. It would be nice to hold onto some of it for a longer time. There are species, even in the badlands that provide food. A little more water retention would help them provide more food.

[andyb]

toomanyirons, nice thread!



Like Day, I rent, and I have pretty severe limits on where I can plant. I have two raised beds in the back yard with an overhanging cherry laurel tree. My son calls it the poisonous tree; every one of its tissues has cyanide in it. Yay. Those are my best beds, but they only get full sun after about 1:00 PM. I have one other raised bed on the south side of the house that gets full sunlight. There's also a flower bed that I've partially converted to a vegetable bed. Finally, I have the start of an oregano grex in containers in the middle of the North fence in the back yard.

All told, I have about 11.5 square meters of outdoor growing space. In addition, I have some shop lights set up in the basement, where I can grow 10 bean plants at a time. That's where I'm doing most of my bean crosses.

My limited growing space really drives what projects I take on. Cilantro is a small enough plant that I can grow and evaluate a few hundred plants in my smallest raised bed or in half of one of the larger raised beds. The interspecific bean crosses take a lot of time, but very little space. We're going to grow tomatoes no matter what, so my tomato project is just along for the ride.

[farmermike]

Jan 27, 2018 3:24:57 GMT -5 richardw said:

The educational ranch looks an interesting setup farmermike , what's the rainfall per year?

The ranch probably gets about 18-19 inches (~480mm). Just a little bit more rain than at my house, because the ranch is about 6 miles closer to the ocean. Of course, that rain pretty much all comes during the cool season (Nov.-Apr.), and virtually none during the warm season. That aerial photo was taken Sept. 2017, which is why the grasslands are totally dry and brown.

Last winter we got double our normal rainfall (38in or 960mm), which made weed-cutting our firebreak much more difficult -- due to some very robust wild black mustard stalks.

That heavy fuel load also contributed to the terrible fires in Napa and Sonoma counties last October.

[farmermike]

Jan 27, 2018 11:51:50 GMT -5 toomanyirons said:

farmermike : "Voles have taken a huge toll on those trees the past 2 years; we've lost at least 50 trees so far."

-What toll, I mean how are the trees being damaged/destroyed?  Maybe we can help you come up with a solution...

The voles damage the trees by eating the bark. In many cases they girdle the trunk all the way around, from ground level up to 8 or 10". This will kill the tree, of course. Although, I am planning to try bridge grafting in attempt to save some of our more established trees. In some cases, on our youngest bare-root trees, they stripped every inch of bark all way up to the tip of the 4 foot tall tree. I tried many methods of excluding them, and when one didn't work, I tried methods more and more elaborate. Finally, in late summer when I thought I had it really figured out, their population crashed and I never got to see if my cages actually worked!

I'll have to find some photos of the damage from the summer, and I think I may post them on a new thread to document this event. I've never seen anything like it.

Edit: Oh yeah, they also chewed through all my plastic drip irrigation hoses. I ended up having to triage those repairs, and a lot of things went without irrigation all summer. Fortunately, we had so much rain that the soil was at maximum moisture capacity. I think this saved a lot of trees that were not fully established. I assume the excess rain also contributed to the vole boom.

[richardw]

So the voles are native to the area?

[farmermike]

Jan 27, 2018 11:51:50 GMT -5 toomanyirons said:

farmermike : 

"A steep south facing slope was probably not the best location for the orchard."

- Just curious why you think this - do you mean not the best from an ease of harvesting perspective?  I guess I can understand that.  Terracing might have resolved that.  I would think that would have been a wonderful location for a vineyard, although terracing would probably be best for that as well.  :-)

I think the south facing slope is not right for the orchard because, it is the hottest spot on the ranch, and the first place where the soil dries out. If we had planted our apples and pears on deep alluvial valley soil or on a north facing slope, I think that they could have lived a very long time with no summer irrigation -- once they were established. I'm not sure that the trees on this south facing slope will ever be able to survive long term without irrigation.

An outside organization planted the orchard for us in 2015, and I was out-voted when I suggested planting it on a north facing slope. The current location has better access from the parking lot, and nice visibility from the street. I thought that organization knew what they were doing, and would help us care for the orchard, but they bailed out and I was left fighting a pitched battle to maintain this fairly unsustainable situation. I have definitely considered abandoning this location, but I think I may just try to maintain like 30 trees near the bottom of the slope; the deer fencing and irrigation system is already in place. The original planting was 80 trees.

Harvesting won't be a problem, because the slope isn't too steep. And the crew that did the first planting did do some light terracing by hand. We would probably need much more dramatic terracing for substantial moisture retention. 

[farmermike]

Jan 28, 2018 13:43:52 GMT -5 richardw said:

So the voles are native to the area?

Yep, the California Vole is native and widespread throughout the state. But most people know nothing about them. I wasn't aware of them either until 2010.

Years ago, I had a little business planting native meadow gardens in peoples suburban yards. In 2010 I went back to look at one meadow I had planted way back in 2002, and found evidence of some rodent living in it. I set up a camera trap, and got a photo of a native vole. It seemed like a great victory at the time. My habitat planting had attracted a native species back to a location where they hadn't lived for years. (California Quail were also nesting in that meadow garden!)

Fast forward to 2018...now I know better.

I think the population booms after mild and wet winters. During the drought from 2011-2015, they didn't do any noticeable damage.