What if we lived off rainfall alone?
Just out of curiousity, how far off is our current water usage from the amount of rain that falls on us? Our land is 1.32 acres, and the average rainfall here is 16 inches. This means that an average of 573,150 gallons of rain fall on the land each year. Our roof...
Rain is not sewage
Yesterday, we got an unusually strong storm for mid-May. My yard received 0.7 inches; but the San Diego Airport got 1.84 inches! For San Diego, that's the wettest day in May ever, according to the National Weather Service. For the whole Southern California...
Saving water by applying urine as fertilizer
I balked at the idea of urinating into a toilet bowl of fresh, drinkable water when I first returned from Lesotho. Not that I'd forgotten that was the norm in America. I'd done it my whole life until moving to Lesotho. But as the G.K. Chesterton quote goes, "The whole...
Do you need two avocado trees to get fruit?
No, you don't need two avocado trees to get fruit. Before I explain how I know this, let me say where I think this myth originates: avocado flowers are strange. They are dichogamous, it's called by botanists. The standard description of avocado flower behavior can be...
Applying urine as fertilizer
We know that urine has nutrients which plants use, but how to give it to them? The simplest guideline is to pee in a spot once and only once. Here are some details and research that support this guideline. One approach is to use the following statement by Håkan...
Your urine can be fertilizer
If you were to urinate on the ground beneath plants, it turns out that you would add many of the same nutrients to the soil that bags of fertilizer add, and in similar quantities. Bags of fertilizer are always labelled with their proportions of the three...
Apricot flowers becoming apricot fruit
The bloom on a branch of a Royal Blenheim apricot tree on March 4: And then the fruitlets the flowers have become on April 12: And here is the tree almost exactly six years later: April 13, 2021. Fruitset is weak this year: April 19, 2021. All of my Yard Posts are...
Winter grafts on deciduous fruit trees
Between January 29 and February 25, I took scion wood and grafted onto my deciduous fruit trees. I used the whip method for all nine grafts, and seven of the nine are growing today. Over the last year, I'd planted four new deciduous fruit trees, but I wanted more...
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