Water, from the Other Side
Sharon February 10th, 2009
http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/2009/02/water-water-everywhere.html
Aaron has a terrific post up about water issues and water harvesting at his blog, and he devotes an entire paragraph to the other end of the water issue – flooding, and drainage. Me, I thought that I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks it is worth more attention than that 
. While I know that water shortages are the big issue worldwide, where I live, too much water is far more often the problem.
My area gets more than 50 inches of precipitation a year, a mix of snow and rain – and usually pretty evenly spread out. Our summers have warm days, cool nights and plenty of rain – now the summer 3 years ago when I barely had to water even my *container* plants because it rained so much is pretty unusual, but except for establishing seedlings occasionally, I have *NEVER* watered most of my garden. The hose doesn’t even reach it. The first two years we lived here were drought years, and even then, we did not water and things grew fine.
Part of this is because I live between two steep hills – most of the water runs down those hills, and eventually runs to the creek that borders the north side of my property. Before it gets to the creek, it runs across most of the rest of my property. During spring melt-off, we have several days of mild-to-moderate flooding. And once in a while, we get serious flooding, usually in early spring.
But even ignoring the flooding (and Aaron’s prescription to put your garden where it doesn’t flood is good), our soil tends to hold water. Waiting for things to dry out is the real limiting factor in gardening – it isn’t warmth we need (although that helps the drying) but enough dry out to be able to go forward. It really isn’t worth planting seeds into the muck – they simply rot. Transplants can sometimes tolerate it, but honestly, everything sits in the muddy wet soil (with the exception of a few plants that like it) and waits for dryer days – I’ve learned the hard way not to rush it, that plants transplanted a week later when conditions are better grow faster than the ones that sulk because their early conditions weren’t better.
One thing that I’ve discovered is indispensible to wet gardening is mulch – now much is made of the capacity of mulch to retain water. This is not exactly my issue. Instead, I use sheet mulch to protect my soil from flooding and heavy rains – the mulched areas shrug off some of the water, and the organic material helps absorb some more of it, so my mulched garden areas tend to look better after spring thaw, and to be ready to plant earlier. I rake away the mulch on warm day to let the soil warm a bit more, but I can be out on the mulched patches planting days ahead of any unmulched areas. I’ve never read any other garden writer’s discussions of the value of mulch in wet climates.
Generally speaking, as long as you have decent drainage and plenty of organic material, most garden crops tolerate the wetness pretty well – in fact, many of them like it. We do have problems with tomato cracking, and with getting hot peppers hot enough for me, but container growing helps with the peppers, and harvesting regularly before the rains with the tomatoes.
If you don’t have decent drainage, you may have to get some. At its simplest, you can dig a swale or trench and redirect water by hand. If you get fancy, and go for tile and backhoes, you are looking at money. We have areas still awaiting sufficient funds to justify the drainage work that is needed. Still, we do save on irrigation hoses . And we try, as much as we can, to work with what we’ve got, to see our wetness as an advantage, that brings other species and possibilities.
Perennial plantings that aren’t wetland tolerant get the dryest spots, and they generally do fine. It is worth watching nature to see what does well – I have a thicket of cultivated plum trees in the back field that gets very wet in springtime – I was reluctant to plant much of anything but alders and elderberries there, because of the wet land, but native plum trees kept springing up, and I decided to take that as meaning I could get away with the cultivated type – and so I can, apparently.
Actual wet spots have their uses as well – I’m in the process of transforming the end of the side yard, which was uninspiredly planted to reed grass, into a wetland garden – swamp white oaks have edible acorns, beautiful wood and are great fungal hosts, buttonbush is a nectary plant that blooms at a helpful time for wild pollinators, primroses and irises add beauty, alders fix nitrogen and are a coppicing and mushroom hosting species, elders, blueberries and cranberrybush viburnums provide food for me and for wildlife – what’s not to love about wet spots! Not to mention the fact that the world is desperate for diversified wetlands – so not draining your land to get every single inch of cultivable space has some real merits.
The biggest problem, besides occasional flooding, of wet spots is leaching – the nutrients you place get washed away quickly, so fast you can’t keep up. This is another good argument for mulched soil in my climate, for lots of organic matter and humus in your soil, for terra preta practices, and for emphasizing slow release fertility rather than quick.
In the end, I personally like my wet spot – I’m grateful for the rains, and the snow. But living on the damp edges of the world requires, as all spots to, becoming native to that place and its conditions.
Sharon
- garden design , water
- Comments(14)
“Harvesting” water? Did you plant it?
The word “harvest” is so misused these days — usually to justify taking something that isn’t yours. It has pretty much replaced “hunt” and “fish” in many circles. If you have cultivated belugas then you can harvest them; otherwise you are hunting them. Harvesting is limited by how much you have planted. Hunting is limited by… hunting licenses. The limits on which are determined by bureaucrats and politicians, not by real conditions.
An analogy to the depradation of the seas going on these days is mining, not harvesting. If the cod stocks were truly being harvested we would be sowing fry to replace them. They are actually being mined: whoever can get to them fastest gets them until they are all gone. The presence of a single fish-miner removes the incentive for limited fishing based on an understanding of conservation, because the fish-miner ensures that conservation will not happen. Other fish consumers either have to give up or ramp up to get some of the remaining fish before they are all gone. And it’s precisely fish miners who have substituted the word “harvest” to describe what they do, as though there were something inherently self-limiting to it, or as if they had some natural entitlement to their catch.
I haven’t read the article you linked to, but I assume that water is not being removed from the water cycle and what is being discussed is not causing the sort of vast wreckage that fishing has. However, “water collecting” is still a perfectly good phrase and does not cheapen the word “harvest,” removing it from the context of a crop that has been sown.
One of the most straightforeward ways to deal with soil that holds water is to put in raised beds. Allows at least the top few inches of the soil to dry faster and warm sooner in the spring.
In dry sandy areas, reverse that – used depressed beds, to hold water better or allow roots to at least reach some soil hidden deeper in that soil.
Fern
Another suggestion for wetter boggy land is to plant Willow. It will dry out and firm up the land around it a bit, easy to plant by just sticking fresh-cut branches in the ground and letting them root, provides weaving/basket material, medicine (contains phyto-chemicals related to salicylic acid – aspirin), auxin-rich ‘tea’ as a rooting formula for cuttings, bee-friendly and benefits the local ecology by providing wildlife habitat and nesting material.
Were I live once had a reliable rainfall 800mm to 850mm pa. – this year it has not rained for 7 weeks – and it has been hot – we have run out of water in the rainwater tank earmarked for the garden and have had to install a line and pump from our 1.5 acre foot dam (pond) just to keep our fruit trees and garden alive!
We do live in interesting times.
In a more balanced economy, boggy areas would be potential energy sources as the willows and other brushy types grow quickly and could be composted for hot water (heating) and biogas production via some model on the Jean Pain method.
I would also like to agree with the fishing analogy…individual effects on the freshwater systems of the world occur through large-scale industrial activity. Responsible actions by individual landowners are, of course, positive. However, as long as society operates through these sorts of industrial activities our freshwater supplies WILL one day be no more.
Actually, Alison, it is completely correct to refer to “gathering” as harvesting – both in modern usage and etymology. The root word of “harvest” comes from words that mean “to pluck” or “to gather” and don’t necessarily refer to cultivated crops.
While I agree that the problem of overfishing is enormous, I don’t agree that it is a problem with the usage of the term “harvest” at its root – nor do I think that gathering rainwater that would otherwise be sent into storm drains is in accurately described as harvesting.
Sharon
Thanks for replying, Sharon.
No, I do not think that overfishing is caused by language! I do, however, think that language is deliberately used to obscure what is really happening. While “harvest” may be a technically acceptable alternative to “hunt” or “fish,” these words are even better, more accurate and more traditional to describe the respective activities. (Cf the substitute of the technically acceptable “deliver ordnance” for the traditional “bomb.”)
Alison, but I really think there are excellent reasons to use the word “harvest” for gathering things you did not plant or cultivate – that is, traditional agricultures have always integrated harvesting from the wild and the margins of cultivated spaces with agriculture – Danish farmers, for example, grew wild brome grass in with their grains, so that in a bad harvest year there was still a harvest. Rice farmers depend on the greens, frogs and fish that naturally accompanied paddy rice culture. African gardeners “farmed” the forests and jungles, with small plots of root vegetables integrated into naturally growing forested areas from which they derived fruit, nuts and fuel.
Don’t get me wrong – I think harvesting is a lousy word for industrial fishing – not because we didn’t “plant” the fish, but because harvest also means the season of harvest – there’s a reason that the word is synonymous with “autumn” not just in English but in many cultures. If we took a fish harvest only in a short season, suited to that time, with the brief participation of the whole community (as many native cultures still harvest salmon or deer) I’d have no problem with the language. We don’t, and as you say, we mine fish.
On the other hand, harvesting rainwater from your roof, keeping it out of storm sewers and reducing the need for municipal and pumped aquifer irrigation is precisely harvesting – it is taking something in it season and holding it for a time of need, reducing waste and making the best use of a needed resource.
Sharon
BTW, I think the idea of “planting” willows is pretty funny. Let’s just say that insufficient willow is not a major problem on my property
.
Sharon
Isn’t harvesting rainwater really just delaying the time it takes to make it to the ground? It still gets there.
I live in Rochester and find that even though my garden is on the 2nd terrace on the side of a hill, raised beds are a necessity; we also dug a deep french drain down most of the yard to facilitate drainage. The heavy clay 2 feet down doesn’t help matters. You may have to re-do your raised garden beds to make their base a mixture of sand and mid sized rocks, and then raise the beds by several feet; you should have no problem with drainage after that. Also, peat moss mixed in to the soil should help reduce the water retention.
I garden on silt loam soil in an area that has warm summer nights – lows in the 60s and 70s for at least three months, highs in the 80s and 90s during that time, a few days 100+. Our lowest-rainfall months are in the winter, but that means 2.5″ average as opposed to 3.5″ average for our wettest months, not much of a difference. In the Midwest, though, “average” doesn’t mean much. It’s routine to get a 6-8 week period during the summer with less than 1″ of rain, and that period usually coincides with the summer’s hottest temperatures. On the other hand, we also get rainfalls of multiple inches in a day several times a year. Over the past 24 hours, we had 2.5″ of rain on top of already-saturated soil from snowmelt. So I have to prepare for drought, flood, and everything in between (not to mention high wind and hail) during the growing season. Not much to do about it except for standard good gardening practices – adding compost for organic matter, trying to locate the garden in an area which avoids the worst of flooding rainfall and windy drought, adding water as needed during dry, hot periods (hopefully rain collected off the roof, but more often municipal water as my rainwater storage isn’t yet sufficiently large), and planting a diversity of crops so I get something no matter what happens.
We have a very wet area on our property as a result of laundry washwater and sump pump greywater. We have also used this source of water for irrigation of non-edibles (which we water from rain barrels). I actually like to use the word “harvest” because now I am constructing a rain garden / greywater garden to take even more advantage of it… a sort of second life growing out of it’s first. Greywater treatment is an easy and effective way to irrigate gardens / landscape, and reduce ones ‘water footprint’. And while we are on a well (and so are extremely conscious of our conservation), it is also important for people who use municipal sources of water to take advantage of every opportunity for water ‘harvesting’ or ‘collecting’ (whatever you want to call it). It can be so simple and low-tech, yet can have a huge impact.