Last night the full moon was so bright and a warm downslope Santa Ana wind was blowing from Nevada so it was 60'F instead of the usual 30'F at night. The weather is warm, sunny, dry, and clear. It's drought, but it's very nice weather. It's like Fall, only without the serious heat. It's just nice out. Gets a little chilly at night, but no big deal.
Because of the unusually warm and dry weather, many of the plants have buds on their branches. The weather is confusing the trees and bushes into thinking they should leaf out, which might be bad if we get snow next month and it kills them all. I'm keeping my fingers crossed the plants wait for actual spring, or if that fails, we just get rain instead of snow.
There are other upsides to this. This is the ideal time to clear silt out of the sides of dry reservoirs. You can only do this when they are dry. The silt liquefies in even mild perturbation, so you can't remove it with normal dredging equipment, not unless you can pump the slurry somewhere that won't just flow back in. You can also clear river bottoms of a fair bit of the silt, though apparently the knuckleheads who contract that just throw it on the inner wall of the levee so the first time the river rises or there's rain, it flows right back down. A great sort of job security, but utter fraud in the real world.
Silt is why rivers twist and cut their banks, and why levees are DOOOMMED! Eventually the river bottom rises enough, and the natural physics of silt causes the river to erode the levee, break loose and flood the land around it. Can't be helped. It just is. All solutions to this problem are labor intensive and prohibitively expensive and many are actually short term solutions at best. The only working solution is to raise the level of the land so when the river breaks free it can't flood. That's utterly implausible so many places behind levees are going to someday flood. Inevitably flood. Can't be prevented. But not right now with our reservoirs empty and a lovely 78'F at quarter to 1 PM. Sunny, blue skies, happy times.
To make your water last longer with less waste, the general solution is drip irrigation. Its not very expensive to setup and automate if you have landscaping or a garden. Drip irrigation tubing, connectors, and fittings leading to valves plugged into your water supply. The Valves are controlled by a timer, which turns them on and off at certain times. Its great. You can sleep in, or take vacation, it keeps working. Saves you hundreds a month on paying some landscaping guy. And since we're having drought, we're thinking we might let the back lawn die and replace it with something drought resistant. Something that needs a lot less water but still covers the ground so it won't wash away when it finally rains. Having an automated watering system is a lot of work to setup, depending on if the pipes are buried or not, but the result is a much nicer place to live.
If you are renting an apartment, there are models of this that can use your patio faucet and batteries or the outdoor plug to water your patio plants. A nice thing if you take vacations or work long hours. Most gardeners recommend watering at night so there's less evaporation so more of the water is used by the plant. If it is running out the bottom of the pot, you watered too long. Provided you put the right amount of water on the plant, and water the right number of days, this can help it grow better.
I really enjoyed having my green qumquat tree with its bright orange fruits decorating my patio for 10 years. I watered that by hand until I moved up here. It is still alive, despite being snowed under for a week. Doing fine. It's kind of shocking, but putting it on the watering system really helped it stabilize its roots and grow. I guess there's just the right conditions there. Dad is less enthusiastic, but I do point out its decorative, not something you should eat unless you really want to. You have to eat the sweet skin because the juice is so bitter. Then spit out the seeds. Not very rewarding, but I like how it looks. It is a pity that I'm a little too ignorant of horticulture and gardening to work at one of the local nurseries. I'd like to. Things being what they are, and the economy in California being so terrible, it is probably the best I could hope for. I could probably sit down and read about plants from the Sunset Western Garden Book, a few pages a day, and learn a lot that way. We've got one on the shelf. My other interests don't pay. There are nursery jobs.
So maybe the peaceful and happy life of watering nursery plants for sale? I'll keep my eyes open. Maybe lots of people will be visiting to replace lawns with xeriscaping, needing the drip irrigation to cut back on water and the know-how to get the plants established and happy. Tricky, when the soils here vary so much, but still, you make things as nice as you can afford on a reasonable budget. I can't fix everything wrong with the country, just find a little peace for myself.
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