A day at the dried up lake. Ditch inefficiencies and wetlands. The growing is done, time for a haircut.
A day at the dried up lake.
We got to our last stop of the day by crossing over a canal: a bridge lined on both sides with a 6 foot chainlink fence which carried up and downstream long enough to dissuade the lazy from trying to end run around it. Signs dotted here and there on the fence promising Federal retribution were there for the hardier souls that might think to try.
This is the same canal we've been following from its mucky, stagnant "headwaters" a few miles back. Like rolling up a snowman, it's wider with more flow. The fence and signs here pass without comment from Allen Jones. It's the same canal we've seen running next to innocuous pipes and manholes holding wells and pumps three or four times now.
Jones, a decades-long resident and retired well driller, pilots his truck through the entrance side of an empty brick state park entrance gate. Why there's a need for an entrance or exit side is beyond me. No one's entering or exiting. More signs, but not people.
Out from under the gate, the vista again opens up. The character here (near the park) is certainly quite a change from my nearly perpetually dry corner of the northeastern plains, but it's also different from the terrain up near the head of the valley where the headwaters were.
Down here, the ground is knobby. Hillocks topped with sage brush and sand between, evidence that it once held water, or at least COULD hold water instead of it sliding off to a low spot like at home.
There is, of course, no water. Probably hasn't been for a while now. Well, except for what the canal is carrying south out of the valley.
On the right something new, not visible until you pass the gate and clear a berm. There are a couple of empty-neglected clamshell picnic shelters looking over a shallow flat bowl of earth. A skim of water sits on the far end, a likely result, Jones says, of a recent uptick in rain.
Jones pulls up in front of the boat ramp sign and parks. Getting out, the first thing that catches my eye is dry riprap embedded in dirt. This was the edge of what used to be a lake. Not a reservoir, not manmade, a lake. A lake surrounded by wetland. What it is now is much more suited to rattlesnakes wanting to sun themselves.
Off on the right, a bend in the shore is home to a struggling tree. The kind of tree used to being next to an ample source of water. Absent that, its main canopy is denuded and a flush of suckers poke up out of the crown. Last gasp.
Sage- and rabbitbrush, however, don't struggle. They like the dry. They don't mind the heat. You can see them marching steadily out from the shore, slowly colonizing the lakebed. Big at the edge, smaller the further out you get.
I bet you could date the number of years this lake has been dry by charting their spread like counting rings in a trunk.
The whole place carries the feel of a Chernobyl, abandoned mid-sentence. Unlike Chernobyl, it's not radioactive (and not entirely the result of humans), but it's like Chernobyl in that it got this ghost town feel as a result of human decisions.
This is all the more apparent by what Jones shows me before I hop in my car and head back for the plains. An electronic headgate, likely controlled by someone in an office in New Mexico, that could be opened and fill this lake from the fenced canal we crossed to get here.
Jones doesn't get it and I don't either. This park was partly one of the selling points of the Closed Basin Project, the project that built the canal carrying water away down out of the valley. Former home to recreation and camping--Jones tells of people coming by on a Wednesday after work to enjoy some time on the water--it's parched while water flows between fences with warning signs.
Remind me again why we paid to build the park? Remind me who is benefiting in this enterprise?
Jones makes other points too. The sum total of the value of water sent down that canal comes to numbers likely so big as to lose meaning to all but a government accountant. Despite that value flowing every minute of every day of every year since the Closed Basin Project started, no one seems to be asking about it. No one seems to complain. No one (at least no one in power) seems willing to revisit why we're doing this.
If they found a rich mineral vein here and started strip mining, piling up giant mounds of overbuden and tailings, adding greatly to the traffic on the highways, taking the equivalent value out of the valley, I doubt anyone would be as quiet.
Perhaps because water , while not creeping on silent cat feet like fog but still as quiet in a lined canal, doesn't make much noise we can safely ignore it.
Nevermind the fact that those with surface water rights haven't had their due in 20 odd years.
Nevermind the fact that you need groundwater UNDER a river to make the river flow ABOVE ground.
Nevermind that the closed basin isn't really as closed as some thought and that the water is dropping, giving it more dissolved solids, turning artesian wells into bubblers, dropping water tables.
Nevermind that asking your Federal Rep (Boebert) only gets you an "I'll look into it" tossed over a shoulder as she exits the valley.
This remains resolutely something that only a few like Jones keep hammering at.
I'm not a resident of the Valley. I'm not a water expert. But I too cannot seem to square why this doesn't merit a larger (and, yes, statewide) discussion.
Maybe this seemed a good idea way back, maybe it's not having too deleterious an effect on things down here, smaller by a long shot than the drought, but these are all good things that we could be talking over. No environment is static, what would it hurt to revisit things?
I have lived on this planet long enough to speculate about this: someone, somewhere likes the order of things down here. I have no clue who or why, but people don't stir things up when they like the way it's going, when it works well for them.
I'm not going to point fingers. I wouldn't even know which vague direction to point in.
But I do know someone likes the current order and that Jones' "why" needs an answer.
Related:
An op ed below on how irrigation ditches contribute to wetlands and can help build habitat in the arid west.
Lots going on in there. I enjoyed reading. I could share many things from it, but the quote below light up the brightest to me.
"Decades ago, Aldo Leopold wrote, 'There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One, you think that heat comes from the furnace, and two, you think that breakfast comes from the grocery store.' May I add a third? We don’t know much about the water we depend on."
Hear hear. You do not have a good sense of the value of water in helping produce the things you eat until you actually see how farms use it. If you get that chance, take it.
https://www.themountainmail.com/opinion/article_2fd3bb4a-3d6e-11ef-8291-07a61d0ac523.html?utm_campaign=blox&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0sCzyX4Yt32zRkWCY4iaxKGr2-aZrO5j19wN2ppr_tDWiG2VM2NJVRzZw_aem_ZC1rKiP_hIzqrRM1uJk6iw
The above post is a follow up on my earlier series about the Closed Basin Project in the San Luis Valley.
If you would like to read the series, you'll find the newsletters linked below in chronological order.
I was invited by Mr. Allen Jones to come down and see the project in person. I also wanted to meet another person I spoke with about the project, longtime resident and poet Peggy Godfrey, so I drove down this summer.
I am grateful to both for their help with the earlier series, for their hospitality, and also for their advocacy. I respect greatly those that get involved and speak up. Godfrey and Jones are working hard to try and get some sort of discussion and/or revisiting of the Closed Basin Project going.
There are, from what Godfrey has told me, some optimistic signs. Turning a ship like this is a big project and will take time, however. Bless those that are willing to work for an uncertain outcome and for one that will take a long time to see.
I hope I was able to convey my impressions of what I saw adequately. We live in a complicated world, I do not deny that. I also do not deny that a prolonged drought and watering crops has had a profound effect on the supply and distribution of groundwater in the valley.
But, as I hinted in the update, we are where we are as a result of our choices and one of those choices is to mine water out of the ground to send downriver, a choice that might have made sense before, but with technological developments and weather changes has proven to be shortsighted. A choice that despite the predictions of designers, maybe hasn't turned out to be as benign as originally thought.
Why on earth can this choice not be revisited in light of new information or changing dynamics? A question I've asked often enough about a number of government policies, but one brought to sharp relief with a tour of a dry lake and a simple question asked by a resident.
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/polis-tries-to-reframe-and-blame?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/the-closed-basin-project-fixed-the?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/a-tone-deaf-media-op-ed-pointing?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/i-think-parker-library-made-the-right?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/rwr-awdi-and-slv-water-nm-democrat?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Espalier pruning: now that the trees are done actively growing (for the most part) and are hardening off their new growth, it's time to give those pears a haircut!
Last one of the day and you know what that means: something for fun, not related to politics.*
If you have a tree or bush nearby, and you are bored, pop out and give it a look. As you follow a branch out to the very end, you'll notice this year's new growth. Depending on the variety, how much care it got, how much water it got, this could be longer or shorter, but the new growth should be pretty apparent.
It'll be softer, more flexible, and likely the bark will be a different color.
If you watch that new growth over the next couple weeks or so, you'll start to notice a change. It will change color, the new growth will start to firm up (won't bend as easily), and you'll see at the very end of that new growth that nothing new appears.
Put another way, come late summer, trees and shrubs will start hardening off their new growth in preparation for the long winter ahead.**
That means many things, but if you have an espalier, for you as the human, it means time to prune. That was one of the chores this week for me. I went out and gave my pears a haircut now that they're (mostly) done growing.
If you're curious at the kinds of pruning you do with espalier trees (and/or how to start one), I put a link to the reference I've been using for pruning below. Espalier training is more work than regular pruning true, but it's not unmanageable and this keeps me out of the bars.
Pictures 1 and 3 show my D'Anjou and Bosc respectively in their shamefully shaggy glory prior to pruning. The D'Anjou actually had taller vertical shoots (so-called "water spouts" because it's like a whale's spout shooting up from a branch) than this, I just cut them off a couple weeks ago so they weren't sticking up 3 feet!
Pictures 2 and 4 show those same trees with their new buzz cuts. Looking much better and you can really see that D'Anjou (which is older) starting to look like a mature tree. Another year or so and it'll be blooming.
The Bosc is still a youngun and I'm still struggling to get its cordons completely filled out. I didn't buy a special espalier "whip" (the term for small trees which you can train almost literally from the ground up). I bought a youngish tree and figured I'd train that, even if the shape was funky. That hasn't worked out real well, but I'm not going to yank the tree at this point. It's an older tree and it's growing well so far.
If you look closely at picture 4, I outlined some of my unorthodox branching from this season. One of the lower cordons actually bends down to the wire as opposed to up (a no no? not sure but I'm doing it). I also had no sprouts at the top to fill in the top wire, so I decided to train a vertical shoot up from wire 2 to be a cordon on wire 3. Again, not the classic method, but needs must as the devil drives.
I will still have to figure out how to get a branch to the lower right wire. Perhaps a bud graft? it's the right time of year .... Open to ideas too. If you know more than me, help me out!
That's mostly it pruning-wise for these guys til late winter when I'll touch up the pruning. I think I may also do some experimenting with trading branches via grafts (or get some completely different scions) so as to make each tree self-fertile.
Have a good evening and see you tomorrow!
*Careful readers will note I didn't say last one til Sunday. Tomorrow I will have a special post/newsletter with a couple endorsements for some local races.
**In fact, you don't want to fertilize too late in the year so that you drive your tree or shrub into growing more then having that new growth be damaged or killed.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/fruit/apples/training-espalier
A quick garden note on interplanting with tomatoes.
I saw a video over winter (one of the hundreds of gardening videos I watch as they pop up in my feed) where the gentleman discussed various crops you could interplant with tomatoes.
I forget all his suggestions, but I did try one and thought I'd show the results: carrots seem to work really well interplanted with tomatoes.
Note that this comes with a caveat. This (obviously) works best when you plant the tomatoes and train them to something that allows for the lower-lying carrot foliage to get light, or if you are thoughtful in your pruning and caging.
I have been training my tomatoes to strings for a couple years now (with good results for this variety -- they're Roma tomatoes which are indeterminate, vining everywhere rather than being a bush).
Interplanting carrots with this system is pretty easy. I just cut off the lower bits of tomato leaves once the tomato vines had grown out a little bit to give the emerging carrot greens access to light.
The tomatoes are spaced out per the seed package and the carrots are from a tape I made with my little one (spaced per that seed packet). You can see from the picture that they're happily living together (as they should: the tomatoes like lots of nitrogen which carrots, a root crop, don't need).
Probably do this again next year. I don't like to grow a lot of carrots; I just need enough for a cake and I'm good and interplanting looks like it'll accomplish that goal.
If you're growing both, give it a shot.