We have a commercial landowner nearby who is proposing developing their property in a way that makes most of us worry about the local water supply and traffic concerns. Since the land in question changed hands twelve years ago, they have switched from dry land bean/hay farming with no inputs of water, to a wine-growing vineyard operation with thousands of acres now under irrigation. As the owner drills wells and makes his millions, he is slowly draining the water level, causing some dismay among nearby people who have had their wells go dry. A coalition of locals has been formed to fight this unwise expansion that threatens to displace many families when their wells go dry. Here is their latest letter.
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Hello Neighbors,
I know that many of you are following the recent news stories about the Caltrans proposal to block the five crossings on Highway 101 between the Thompson/Los Berros exit and the Traffic Way exit in Arroyo Grande. Click here to see the recent article in the Adobe Press.
Your NiHA Steering Committee met last week to form a stance on this proposal and to draft a letter to Caltrans. Keep in mind that one of our concerns is that if the freeway crossing opposite of the Laetitia winery is closed, it will give Laetitia an arguing point to force all access to their winery and proposed housing development through the Thompson/Sheehy/Dana Foothill/ULBR entrance. This is not good, since, as you know, our roads cannot handle this heavy traffic. The Laetitia housing development alone calls for and an added 1,000 vehicle trips per day through our little country roads!
I have attached the letter that was sent today to Caltrans, SCAC, and Katcho Achadjian. I hope you will take the time to read it.
I would encourage all of you to write a similar letter expressing your concerns to:
Matt Fowler
Caltrans
50 Higuera Street
SLO, CA 93401
Jay H.
The Nipomo Hills Alliance
PS: With all the rain we have had this season, you might expect Los Berros creek to be running. Right?
Wrong. As it passes Laetitia, it flowed for only two days, and has been dry ever since.
Also…do you have neighbors that would like to keep informed on this email list? If so, please let me know of their address.
We had what is to us a large amount of rainfall in January.
Sometimes nature gives to us with one hand and takes with another…. in this case we were given bounty both times… first with the heavy rainfall coming in long and slow, not causing great erosion problems or run-off… for the most part, it came slow enough to soak into the ground. But it seems the last five weeks have given us more rainy days than not. And now, the next month after, we finally got a week-long break in the weather. We used it here to get caught up on our cactus harvesting and fill back-orders, some of which had waited for a couple of weeks for their cactus leaves. The warmth brought swelling in the buds of the fruit trees which will soon burst forth with blossoms. It also stimulated the flowering of many of the native forbes and flowers. The manzanitas are blooming, and the fragrant ceanothus (California Lilac) is in full bloom with the many shades of blues the various bushes carry. We took a little walk through the hills with neighbors, and took some photos of blooming flowers.
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home
Your house is on fire and your children are gone
All except one, and that’s Little Anne
For she has crept under the warming pan.
We went walking along a local stream and found a nest of ladybugs. They will sometimes winter in protected places… waiting through the winter for warm weather to arrive when they will spread their little wings and fly to lay the eggs that will hatch into ‘Aphid Lions’ and eat aphids by the score!
Oddly, it is the babies that eat the most aphids… and these little guys don’t look anything like a ladybug! This is one of the reasons why it’s important to not use any poisons at all if you can avoid it… you might well be killing bugs that would take care of much of your bug problems.
Here are some ladybugs wintering near us…
They are near the stream.. perhaps the extra humidity near the stream is good for them… also the temperature moderation helps them. This is deep in a steep narrow canyon… this spot gets no direct sun until February…. the ladybugs may like this as it keeps them asleep through the winter… sun rays would warm them too early. They need to maintain themselves in a wintering state until the season is advanced enough for them to be able to rely on the weather.
I didn’t bring my glasses with me… so I got the focus off… rats!
Our recent storms were pretty rough for this area… many of the ladybugs got knocked off the branches and lay in a deep mat on the ground. But they are just fine… they like being all snuggled in together like this… surrounded by the grasses.. kept cool and moist as they try to semi-hibernate through the winter.
Sometimes when people have a pest problem they might buy a container of ladybugs. The idea is the ladybugs will eat your bugs. The problem is they usually fly away after being introduced to the garden. Also, one has to remember that ‘The Balance of Nature’ is not really a balance.. it is a seesaw. Once food resources are thin in an area, the eaters must find a new spot to dine. So you’ll likely lose most whatever you do… but you should also have some come in from outside areas. My concept of this issue is…. for the most part, proper conditions make for clean plants. Make sure your soil, moisture, nutrient and lighting conditions are correct for your crop, and you’ll likely get very good growth with few problems. This is why we grow cactus.. it is one of the best crops for our conditions. This is one of the limitations of the ‘locavore’ movement… sometimes it is best to bring food in from another area rather than have to expend great resources growing it locally.
If you do order ladybugs… water your garden in the late afternoon on the day you get them…. then while the garden is moist…. when the sun has gone down.. at dusk… gently shake the ladybugs from their mesh bag or container… place the rim near the ground under the canopy of leaves. Let them feel the cool moist earth and feel the enfolding leaves above as they gently roll out onto the soft fluffy ground… give them a feeling of security so they will not be greatly frightened… you want them to start off life at your place with a feeling it is a good place for them with shelter and moisture. Hopefully when the morning comes they will be in a good mood, and climbing among your plants finding good food resources, and being compelled to lay the eggs which will hatch into the voracious insects known as ‘Aphid Lions’.
BTW, while we sell our cactus…. we don’t sell the insects and animals… LOL, I’ll not be scooping these critters up to sell them off… sorry.
We’ve had nearly a week of rainy weather… accompanied by high winds.
Some local areas got twelve or more inches of rain in a week…. this is about one third of a usual year’s rainfall… all in one week. For many places, this would be merely a regular stormy week…but it is the first such weather we’ve had in three or four years.
Here is a flooded area just off the 101 in the Avila area.
Here are two shots I took near our place… one is a downed oak in the canyon.
We had several trees go down in the canyon. The soil is so wet that the winds allow the roots to semi-liquefy the soil by moving the tree back and forth, hour after hour, day after day… for five or more days while the rain comes down, hour after hour, day after day…. this can help the tree topple.
The other photo is a nearby field, used to graze beef cows…. it is years since I have seen this amount of runoff water on this spot. The water has natural drainage swales… these people treat this ground prety good… they never allow livestock in while the ground is marshy… it is bad for the feet of the animals… and it turns the wet spots into mud wallows that don’t provide any food for the animals, and keep them muddy. Their animals are rotated around different fields so they always have fresh clean grasses, and never destroy the structure of the soil.
On the left is a tree that went down on the canyon road … there was no way to get around it. This has happened before.. once I traded vehicles with a neighbor on the other side of a downed tree…. it got me home, and him to work. Some local folks carry chainsaws with them when coming in and out… you never know when a tree will come down…
In a case like this it is local custom that anyone coming along with a chainsaw may take what they can cut… but the first goal is to open the road. In this case, the county came by and cut it. Usually when a tree goes down like this, local canyon dwellers usually cut it up and haul it away before an hour has gone by…. he who waits will not get wood. In this case.. the wind was blowing fiercely, and no one else was about… I went home and waited out the storm rather than risk a tree falling on me. I was going out taking a cat to the vet to be teutored… this is the third time he has escaped his lessons… the first time he got locked in a neighbor’s garage, the second time he clawed his way out of the doggie door while being held indoors overnight… and this was the ‘third-time’s-the-charm’ thing.. and it seemed like God caused the tee to fall to keep this cat’s bloodlines going…. what’dya think?
This is a neighbor’s barn. We had a few hours of decent weather between the thunderstorms…. just after I took this photo the radio sounded off with the ‘Public EmergencyAlert’ (first time I recall hearing an actual messag on it instead of jsut a test), warning of a severe thunderstorm crossing Pismo Beach, and heading inland at thirty MPH. A few minutes down the dirt road hail started falling onto the truck. We seldom get hail… I’ve only seen it here perhaps five times in the last twenty years. The severe thunderstorm was overhead. In a matter of minutes the wind started roaring and blew like crazy again.
Here is a photo of some clouds coming onto the shore at the Dinosaur Cove area near Pismo Beach. On the way back into the canyon I saw a young deer on the road… My first photo used the flash… but the deer was too far away… but I like the deer-eyes glow. You can see what condition our road is in…. four miles each way daily will take a toll on car batteries, and suspension systems.
A storm like this can topple some of our cactus plants also. The large Opuntia ficus-indica to the far left fell over…. it was perhaps seven feet tall, and probably weighs about one hundred pounds.
The middle photo is some of the grasses growing on one of our hillsides.. notice how they are bent over by the rain and wind. I really want the grasses to grow… they absorb water reducing runoff, they also open the soil permitting more water entry, helping the water to infiltrate into the soil. Depending on the situation, we often let the grasses grow, mature and set seeds. We will then mow them to reduce the cover for snakes, and keep the weed stickers down. The cut grasses form a mulch on the soil.
The third photo is one of our outdoor cats, Elizabeth Little-Grey. She sleeps in a little cat-condo… here she sticks her head out. We often lay a blanket over the condo at night, to help keep her warmer. On occasion we’ve brought her indoors during storms, but she doesn’t like being indoors at all… she quickly runs to the door begging to get out. She’s really cute and friendly outdoors though. All-in-all, it’s been a fairly un-fun experience the last week. Plenty of ag and mining operations have lost much production. The tourism industry likely lost some revenue during these storms… but on-the-other-hand… we’re pretty darn lucky… things could have been worse (but we’re not out of the weather yet), most of the country has had much worse weather for the last two months than this one single week has been for us. So we’re really lucky, but still hope we don’t have to go through anything near this again for some years.
Well, I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa,
they sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall.
I bring them flowers about every day,
but I just got to cry when I think what they’d say;
If they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast,
and just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
So go on now and kiss it goodbye,
but hold on to your lover,
’cause your heart’s gonna die
Go on now and say ‘goodbye’ to our town, to our town.
Can’t ya see the sun’s settin fast on our town, on our town
goodbye.
This is a photo of the sun setting beyond our town, Nipomo Calif on New Years’ Eve We’re a very lucky little place, blessed with great weather, but sadly most of the town sits on a huge sand dune so most ag products will not grow well in the sand.
Yet we’re a little tiny agricultural town… but we don’t grow corn or rice here… our main ag products are nursery plants. Since the weather is so conducive to growth, and the highway 101 runs right through town, and there are natural gas pipelines nearby… there developed a greenhouse industry in our location. I don’t know how many acres are under glass and plastic here…. I know some operations that have hundreds of acres covered. so I’d imagine there may well be over a thousand acres under glass here. They grow seedlings for the farms in California and neighboring states. Seedlings are a very fragile little thing, and growers have much more success by having them grown in the tightly-controlled conditions of a greenhouse….. then enough tomato or celery seedlings for a forty acre field might fit into a tractor-trailer rig and get pulled to the Central Valley to be laid in that loamy soil.
The economy has hit this place like it has any others. But people still need to eat…. so while things are tough, and some homes have shuttered, things will go on. But still, this lonesome plaintive song by Iris Dement accompanied by Emmylou Harris is heart-and-soul of the nature of a small town…
Here’s two photos I took of the hillsides nearby the town. While most of the rest of the country is blasted by horrid temperatures, we’ve been basking in daytime temps in the sixties and low seventies. Most nights are staying in the forties.
Winter is the time that we have green hills…. by May the plants will be putting out seeds and drying up. All through the summer our hillsides tend to be parched and barren… tan tawny blankets piled high around one side of the town… the other side open to the moderating effects of the ocean… this keeps the town from getting too hot in the summer… and it helps keep it warmer in the winter.
This is the view I get every day! Our main cactus plantings are just up the hill behind me.
I think the cactus like the view, and they like the soils we’ve built up.
Happy cactus comes from California!
Timing is everything….
The best times for roto-tilling vary on location, soil types, prospective crops, cover crops and local weather conditions…
In this area, we get most of our rain in the winter… and the temperatures in winter are usually pretty decent.
Most of the native forbes growth here is in the winter when the rains enable growth, and the nice temps encourage lush growth. I like to let the winter-time native weeds and grasses grow through most of the winter. They can form a nice dense carpet of green that I can then roto-till into the soil… putting that nourishment back into the soil, while simultaneously adding a huge amount of green matter to the soil. This will in time break down into that soil-building material called humus. An abundance of humus is usually characterised by a dark soil, with excellent friability (workable, breaks apart easily, has air/water pore spaces). These same characteristics enable easy penetration by roots, and a flourishing soil micro-fauna/flora environment…. this is the true key to building soil. You need to get those little critters that are in the soil to high numbers…. they will secret enzymes that help plant growth, and further break down the natural soil particles, freeing the good minerals for the plant growth.
Soil must not be tilled when it is too wet, nor when too dry… it is something you have to learn for your own soils…. if you really must till today for some reason, but your soil is too dry, you should have watered it a few days beforehand, tilled dry it can turn into a powder that repels water, and when still dry can easily blow away. If it is too wet, you will beat it into a mass much as a potter expels air from clay.
Treat your soil right…. if you don’t, you’ll lose harvest. Your soil will also be harder to work… weeds will be harder to pul out….. and you’ll have more hard or powdery patches where nothing good will grow.
This is one of our terraces…. it has not been tilled for nearly a year… and the native nettles (a really excellent green food source full of minerals) have grown pretty rampant at this end…. the other end of the terrace has more shade, and the chickweed (another wild edible green) have grown heavily at that end. This is a good stage to till them into the ground… they have not yet set seed, but are just now starting to open flowers… so the top growth has nearly as much nutrients as it will ever carry, and it is still no risk at all of having viable seeds that will mean a quick resprout.
We did some cactus picking and boxing yesterday… as we were leaving the hillside orchard where we grow most of our cactus, we picked some peppers and persimmons to bring to the house as well as a few cactus leaves.
Fresh foods are good… everything has its season… persimmons are best kept on the tree through frosts… then they have to get really gross and mushy… then they are the sweetest… but you’re not likely to find them sold that-a-way… they won’t last in transit while mushy.
The peppers are at the end of their season… but with luck the plants might live through the winter and yield again next year.
Jerusalem Artichokes are actually a type of sunflower. They can survive and produce a little even in barren soils that a lot of other plants don’t survive in at all…. for this reason they are considered a ‘famine food’ that may pull a people through hard times while they wait for their crops to grow back, or foreign armies to leave. But it is best considered a one-year root crop, replanted in a new area each year, and the old area mown several times and water withheld to stop it regrowing in that spot. In some areas they can become an invasive weed… but in this dry area all we need do is withhold water for the summer. The second-year harvest is not as good from a patch, so start anew yearly in a fresh spot. If you really want some decent production, give it good soils, and a nice watering every week.
Ours have always had good success as far as resistant to pests… except for gophers which gnaw on some of the roots, but don’t do near the damage I’d expect.
These are Jerusalem Artichoke tubers fresh out of the ground. We always let the winter kill the parent plants. Then whenever we want to eat some of the tubers, I go and dig up a plant or two. I keep most of the tubers for eating, and plant the rest in another area already prepared so I can easily slip the tubers into the soil three feet apart. By March I’m seeing evidence of growth on the tubers I harvest from their ground storage…. that is the time to dig the rest up and re-plant them in the new area. Like any tuber, once they grow shoots you don’t want to eat them.
Notice the knobbly texture…. these things are ‘The Dickens’ to clean. You need a tiny paring knife, and plenty of patience. This is something you don’t want to clean a lot of. Really… the ‘clean/prepare-to-eat’ ratio on this plant is terrible!!! Another reason it is a famine food…. pretty-much, folks just don’t want to have to mess around for a long time to have a bite to eat… that’s why ‘Fast-Food’ is so popular.
From the tubers above, about half of what we got from one plant, the little cleaned pieces were individually sauteed in olive oil. Delicately…. I like them sliced thin and fried a bit quick…. eaten half raw is fine….. they are good raw even. But I like that heat, the taste of the oil… and the pepper and garlic I mix with it…. each tiny little sliver is a delectable morsel…. gained at great cost from the earth. These little plants do OK at taking care of themselves if you have the weather giving you regular rain in summer… but here they still require regular irrigation… and the great effort expended in cleaning them makes me loath to shovel these down like I do so much food (oh man, can I eat!).
Food safety is a very important issue. And where the foods come from matters more than almost anything.
The US Govt has some very strict standards for food safety, even though we hear often enough of ‘breaks in the system’ that allow contaminated foods to enter the food distribution system. This is why food traceability is so very important. Being able to find the point of origin of all of your foods is a handy thing. That is why I am growing with a food traceability company called www.toptenproduce.com that will enable even small growers to afford the usually very expensive labels and registration codes for the bar codes. In fact, we were the first Charter Grower in the Nation to join the Top 10 Brand.
Most ‘underdeveloped’ countries have a much looser system of food regulations, if they have any at all. It is in my travels through some ‘Third-World’ countries that I ceased eating meat for some time…. I saw how the animals were treated in the small villages, the terrible transport the live animals had to endure stacked five feet high on top of one-another trussed-up in the back of donkey-carts for the travels through the towns. The live animals would be tossed across the streets to land with a thud and a bleat on the stoop of a butcher shop…. hours later I would see the fresh meat hung on hooks hanging outside the shop to entice shoppers to buy. Of course the meat would be buzzing with flies. Even though such countries still have produce-sanitation issues from planting to distribution of plant materials…. often due to the use of untreated sewage (called ‘night soil’ by the folks describing such methods as ‘quaint’) and also to lax controls over packing operations… the risk of illness from plant material is probably much lower in general than the risk from improperly handled meat.
These are Elephant Garlic bulbs. Elephant Garlic is actually a type of giant leek that forms bulbs. I’m not sure it has the regular medicinal qualities of its more sharp-tasting garlic-brothers…. but I am sure it is a still a very healthy thing to eat. I’ve eaten a half pound or more of these at a time… roasted over fire, wrapped in foil and saturated with olive oil. I got the original bulbs from some fellow from whom I had purchased a Roto-tiller about 25 years ago. Ever since I’ve kept the original strain going. I don’t always harvest them yearly… I often let a single bulb grow into a clump for a few years…. Above is a sample clump that resulted from a single clove being planted some four years ago. I now need to break it apart much like you’d divide flower bulbs. These ones should have had this done BEFORE the rains came and got the roots going….
In the photos above we see the clump has been hosed off, to remove most of the soil, and let the roots separate more easily. Separating the roots is much like de-tangling long hair after a four day motorcycle ride.
In our area with the mild winters, it is usual to plant garlic in the middle of October, so I am two months behind. They’ll still grow well though…. and again I’ll likely not harvest in June when they haveripened. So they’ll grow on again for another couple of years in the new spots on two terraces on the hill side
This is how I load the bulbs into the soil…. I just raked the terrace of the excess brush, and then sliced into the soil with a flat spade, pushed it forward to open a little slice into which I dropped the bulbs. I then removed the spade, and pushed the soil around the growing shoot.After this they should be watered to let the soil settle around the newly disturbed and broken roots. Elephant garlic likes good soil….
In our area the garlic does pretty well with just the usual rainfall. It grows through the winter, and matures in the spring when the rains stop. As the early spring comes in, and the foliage starts to die all watering must cease. The bulbs should be harvested and stored in a totally dry, airy and dark location…. We don’t have much of a place like that, so I leave them in the ground where they can be dug as needed through the summer.
Once winter comes again, the bulbs remaining in the soil will start to grow new roots and then foliage…. this is the time you can’t eat the sprouted bulbs…. so if we do need garlic and don’t have any stored, I can harvest the occasional bulb with stalk…. they look much like a giant green onion or leek, slice nicely into a stir-fry or fresh salad. Later when the stalks have become more mature and starting to become pithy, the plants will put out their flower heads…. these can be eaten in several stages of growth….
So even though we only eat the garlic bulbs for half the year… we still get really fine eating out of the other parts of the plants during the rest of the year.
This is one of the clumps of garlic. It is at the stage where the flowers are dead, the stalk has decayed… and the bulbs are going dormant. At this stage they should not be watered anymore. But these ones were growing in the cactus patch, so they did get watered a bit each summer, and survived through well for four years.
This is how large these bulbs can become. This one was about one pound.
They only get this size when grown under optimal conditions. In this case I planted the largest bulbs at the proper time, in perfect soil… rich and loamy. I water a few times until the autumn rains came and kepot them moist through the entire winter….. then as March came, the rains stopped… the seed stalks were harvested as they came out to direct growth to the bulbs, and I did not water. When the foliage showed four or five leaves drying well on the plants, I took them all up and stored them away. But since then I’ve decided it is so much easier to let them store in the ground, grown in the large clumps. We can harvest a bit when we need some, and not haveto worry about a bunch of garlic stored in the attic. Less work, lazier, easier… the bulbs aren’t as pretty though. Grown in the clumps they do not get as large, and as they sit throughthe summer in the ground, they get stained by the soil, so they’re not as clean and pristine. Sometimes the bulbs will separate into the individual cloves, this will allow a lot of dirt to get into the bulb, reducing it’s use cooked whole in foil. But my stomach doesn’t know the difference.. they still taste the same.
