Map Guide to Water Harvesting at Los Angeles Eco-Village, 2008 - written and drawn by me, Joe Linton - click for larger image, link below for pdf of full booklet

Here’s a slightly out of date, but still mostly ok, map/guide to some water harvesting features at Los Angeles Eco-Village. This is part of an 8-page booklet (pdf) I made for the Landscape Rainwater Harvesting workshop where we started building las trincheras. The booklet owes a great deal to lessons I’ve learned from Brad Lancaster’s Rainwater Harvesting books.

Note that, for now, eco-village only does pretty much passive water harvesting – ie: creating landscapes where the water soaks into the ground… not yet rainwater harvesting for later use, such as in cisterns, rain barrels, etc. We’ll get to those soon, I hope.

Three mulberries in my hand. The lower left one is whitish- not ripe at all. The upper left one is red - almost ripe, but not quite. The one on the right, nearly black with a little red, is about 98 percent ripe and very much ready to eat.

Ms. Eum in front of the Bbong Namu

I was riding home today and ran into a Korean woman named Tae Sook Eum who was checking out my garden. I’d spoken with her a couple of times before. She attends the Mijoo Peace Church across the street, so now and then on a late Sunday afternoon, I come across her happily exploring the front yard garden. I enjoy running into folks in garden, which a front yard garden is condusive to (see my musings on this here and here.) When we run into each other, Ms. Eum and I converse a bit – though my Korean is more limited than her English.

Today she was standing underneath the mulberry tree. This tree is right outside my front door. Like me, it used to live across the street. It was initially planted on the east side of Bimini Place, just south of White House Place, next to the fourplex that L.A. Eco-Village recently acquired. During a street project in 2007 or 2008, the city decided to remove the tree; it was getting big and making it difficult for drivers to see the stop sign. Instead of just destroying the tree, LAEV worked with the city to relocate it. We trimmed a lot of tree branches, and about a dozen folks helped carry the tree across the street, where we re-planted it in a large hole we had dug. Despite how large that hole seemed, it was still too small – and we had to further trim some roots. The tree is really tough and has grown gangbusters in the front yard. Mulberry trees grow to be huge.

Tae Sook Eum spotted the ripening mulberries. She said she was happy to see trees that she was familiar with from her time spent in Korea. She was referring to the mulberry, persimmon, and jujube trees. She told me (and wrote out) the Korean names, respectively:

• Mulberry Tree: 뽕나무 ‘bbong namu’
• Persimmon Tree: 감나무  ‘gam namu’
• Jujube Tree: 대추 나무 ‘dae chu namu’

(Namu meaning tree – or plant – or maybe larger plant – which I vaguely remember from studying Korean briefly when I moved to L.A. I also remember ‘gam namu’ from talking with Mr. Lee when I used to live on White House Place. We planted a persimmon tree there, but it was later removed by the landlord, Mr. Lee’s brother.)

Mulberries, the fruit, start out fairly light – a sort of white-ish green. As they ripen the fruits redden then become nearly black: black with a hint of red. They’re not all that sweet until they get dark. I’ve heard (from a guy at the Papaya Tree Nursery) that there also are really wonderful Persian mulberries that are white when ripe… I am not sure of what specific type of mulberry is in the front yard here.

The fruit actually falls from the tree when fully ripe… but that’s somewhat uncommon for this tree. It’s more likely that the squirrels and birds will eat these berries before I get to them. They’re just ripe this week… so Ms. Eum shared a few ripe berries. I gave her an artichoke and explained how to cook it, and I rushed off to help teach a consensus workshop for new eco-villagers.

jujube tree leafing out, sapote in the background

One of the simple pleasures of Spring is seeing the fruit trees go from barren to leafy. Here’re two pretty uninspired photos of early leafing out. Both photos were taken Sunday March 13th 2011. I like to date stuff on this blog, because, in future years, it can help me look up what was happening when in the past. Above is the jujube tree planted in January 2009. I think the tree got a little stressed the first year… it’s never thrived, never fruited, but it’s certainly alive. I am hoping it gets its bearing and gets going soon. I noticed its tiny leafing out about a month ago… and this past week, it’s taking off nicely.

Below is the persimmon tree along the alley – which was transplanted 3-4 years ago. It fruits a lot… but it’s along a heavy pedestrian traffic alley… which means most of the fruit gets picked before I get a chance. The new leaves really shoot out – a bright light-yellow-green surprise! Both of these trees leaf a bit later than other fruit trees (for examples: peach, apricot, etc.) with the persimmon later than the jujube.

bright yellow-green persimmon leaves that it seems like weren't there a week ago

small artichoke, big hand

Last weekend, I finally spotted baby artichokes on the way. It’s been a wet season for the artichokes – the love all the rain, interspersed with sunny days like this great La Niña winter has given us. The perennial artichoke plants, which die back each summer then re-grow from the roots, seem bigger than ever. The tiny chokes in the center of the plants – they’re, of course, the flower – should grow into yummy full-sized delicacies in a little over a month. I can hardly wait!

Local horse manure piled up in an open dumpster

My good friend Paul is in town, and he has a truck. We made our usual pilgrimage to the local horse stables located in North Atwater Village. We took our forks and shovels and loaded up a truckfull of stable waste. It’s free, and there’s plenty… and it’s great for the garden.

The trick is that, like cheese or wine (well… maybe not), you have to wait. The stuff we pick up locally is about 4/5ths wood-shavings and about 1/5th poop. The woody stuff has been urinated on… so it’s all very rich in nitrogen. It’s too strong to be spread directly in the garden – supposedly it can hurt plants – though I am not entirely sure just how. So, it has to cook first.

We unloaded it in a big pile, next to my small black-plastic composter. I water the pile now and then, and I add it liberally into the composter, mixing it with food and green waste. And, voilà!!, it cooks. It heats up the compost like nothing else, the heat coming from microrganisms metabolizing. It gets nice and hot – and it really steams! The heat, when sustained, will sterilize weed seeds and even kill devil grass.

Then, in about 3-5 weeks, mixing weekly, it breaks down into dark rich organic soil. Very quick in the compost time-frame – usually most stuff breaks down for me in more like 2-4 months, depending on how much attention I give it.

And if we don’t use this great natural organic manure resource, it gets shipped off to a landfill. If any locals would like directions to the stables in North Atwater, comment below. You’ll need a truck and some elbow grease to shovel it… but it’s worth it.

This oak and others could buried any day now - unless you act to support it! Photo by permission of EcoToneStudios - All rights reserved

The story has been covered well by Josh Link at L.A. Creek Freak, Barbara Eisenstein at Weeding Wild Suburbia, and elsewhere, but I want to weigh in briefly on the threatened native oak woodlands site in Arcadia, which Los Angeles County Public Works department plans to bury with sediment.

The San Gabriel Mountains gradually wear down, through rain fall. Mountain streams carry sediment down steep hills and deposit sediment on flatter alluvial plains. This is a natural process;  it’s what created the alluvial places where nearly all Southern California residents live.

At a site along Highland Oaks Drive in the city of Arcadia, sediment from the Santa Anita Wash (an eastern tributary of the Rio Hondo and the Los Angeles River) has built up and now the county wants to deposit that wash sediment on top of an adjacent grove of oak trees. Sadly, the county sees this sediment – rich, wonderful soil – as a problem to get rid of – not as a resource.

This is a symptom of our linear ways of thinking. We contemporary western folks, see many material things going in a line – from mineral to raw material to product to trash to landfill.  I would hope that we would, in permaculture thinking, see the sediment as a resource ever moving in cycles. In natural cycles, the output from each process is the input for another process. The sediment is actually great stuff - valuable, wonderful soil… but we’ve so altered our streams that it’s a problem for us.

I encourage the county to hold off on burying this irreplaceable oak grove treasure. Instead of  destroying it, the county should take the longer view and  instead find a place where this valuable sediment can be beneficial.

I encourage readers to sign the on-line petition… and to follow the links (especially Joshua Link’s stuff at L.A. Creek Freak – a blog where I write a lot.)

Today is a blogger solidarity day on this issue. Check out today’s articles at: Altadena Hiker, ArcadiaPatch, Ballona Blog, Bipedality, Breathing Treatment, Chance of Rain, Echoes, Greensward Civitas, L.A. Creek Freak, L.A. Eco-Village, L.A. Observed, Pasadena Adjacent, Pasadena Daily Photo, Pasadena Real Estate with Brigham Yen, Slow Water!, The Sky is Big in Pasadena, and Weeding Wild Suburbia. More on the way, too!

Yarrow plants I propagated just before the last series of rainstorms. They're doing really well. It's for a project that I will write about soon.

With more wonderful rain on the forecast for tomorrow, I was out in the garden weeding today. One of the very nicest problems we have in the Southern California garden is that there’s a huge amount of flexibility in what seasons we can grow various plants. My friend Erik at Homegrown Evolution, in a post about Stella Natura calendar planting, alluded to this:

But here in Los Angeles, where we have a four month time span to plant most things, following the Stella Natura calendar is a good way of avoiding procrastination.

I call this sort of strategy “punctuation.” To belabor the analogy, in the run-on sentence that is L.A. gardening, we need to find places to put in commas and periods. Some use an external calendar like Stella Natura, I’ve never tried it though. My favorite garden-anti-procrastination strategy to garden in advance of forecasted rain.

When there’s rain predicted, that’s a great time to go out and get something done in the garden. These are kind of obvious, but here are my suggestions:

1. Seed. Seeds first soak up water, then get going. Spreading them before a rainstorm means that they’ll get a good soak on their way to germinating. This is a good activity to do even while the rain is coming down. Other than for fairly large seeds (like beans and corn) I personally don’t bother to dig seeds in much. I figure that nature doesn’t really dig holes for seeds, so why should I?  I  just sow them atop the ground, and let the rain carry them into tiny runnels and crevices. This is especially good for greens – with small seeds – like lettuce, mizuna, collards, kale… just toss them out there and add water. Make sure to keep an eye on them though – weed around them. This is when I haven’t planned ahead enough to actually start these in seed-starter mix – which works really well.
2. Transplant. Plants get a shock when they’re transplanted. Transplanting before rains helps minimize the shock. Rainwater is cleaner and healthier than tap water, so it gets transplants off to a healthy start. If you haven’t planned ahead (does any detect a theme here?) just buy some starters, and get them in the ground in advance of rains.
3. Weed. All that devil grass really likes the rain, too. If you pull it up ahead of the rains, then you don’t let your enemies (said only slightly tongue-in-cheek) take advantage of the rain. If you leave the weeds in, then the rain will help them spread. Preferably fill the voids with a desired transplant…

The best seasons for planting in Southern California are basically any time other than the heat of the summer. This corresponds well with the seasons when we do get some rain (basically September through May.) So, keep an eye on the weather forecast, and make a point of spending at least a little extra quality time in the garden before each predicted rainfall.

Persimmon tree leaves turning a wonderful shocking orange-red - photo taken December 9th 2010

Well… nothing serious or profound here in this post… but I walked out into the garden a couple of days ago and was struck by the beautiful deep oranges and reds in the leaves of Eco-Village’s persimmon tree.

These cell phone photos don’t quite do it justice.

another scintillating shot of those persimmon tree leaves

It’s somewhat similar to some of the things I’ve read from Brad Lancaster‘s rainwater harvesting work and some other permaculture techniques – both of which inspired the terracing I’ve done in my garden at Eco-Village) but still really inspiring to see and hear. Best of all is Andrews’ attitude toward weeds; he says that they do all the work.

If you like those two, watch the whole playlist.

Yarrow in full bloom on Rockwood Street in Los Angeles

I was bicycling home from the Echo Park pool today when I came across this spectacular display of multiple colors of blooming yarrow. I had to take a picture and share it with the greater blogosphere, because I am a big fan of yarrow.

Here’s one more shot of that Achillea millefolium:

Great looking yarrow parkway