Does It Pay to Conserve Water?
Though I have a distaste for the waste of water, which mostly comes from my time living in Lesotho, I've been wondering how much money I save when I'm careful with water use -- here, at home, in Southern California. When I turn the kitchen faucet on and off rather...
Deciduous Fruit through Summer and Fall
My target is a staggered harvest of different fruit through the summer and fall seasons. I've chosen different species and different varieties in order to achieve that. There are certainly a few alternative species or varieties I could have chosen to achieve the same...
Oranges and mandarins fresh off the tree almost all year
Citrus are so ubiquitous in Southern California that you might think they're native, and they're so easy to grow here that I've gone for planting multiple varieties in my yard with the aim of getting fresh fruit off the trees almost every month of the year. While I do...
The New Year’s 2015 Freeze Damage and Its Lessons
The low temperature at the Ramona airport on New Year's morning was 25 degrees, one degree above the record low. The temperature sensor under the eaves of my porch bottomed out at 30 degrees. (The porch’s shelter keeps it a couple degrees higher, but we’re slightly...
The New Year’s 2015 Freeze
On the eve of the winter solstice, December 20, I got to thinking about how warm it had been. We still hadn't had anything near a frosty morning. The winter before (2013-2014) we had some chilly nights in late November and our coldest spell of the whole winter...
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