Vinnie's Place

01/15/2022

The great horse manure crisis of 1894 refers to the idea that the greatest obstacle to urban development at the turn of the century was the difficulty of removing horse manure from the streets.

The name refers to a supposed 1894 publication in “The Times”, which said "In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure".[3] The reasoning was that more horses are needed to remove the manure, and these horses produce more manure. An urban planning conference in 1898 supposedly broke up before its scheduled end due to a failure to find an answer to this problem. No such statement in the Times, nor conference result, is known,[2] but in 1893 London there was a complaint that horse manure, formerly an economic good that could be sold, had become a disposal problem, an economic bad.

Wikipedia

The lady down the road and around the corner a ways raises horses. As a result she has the corresponding amount of horse manure. Her and her old man solved the problem by purchasing a two-ton dually pickup truck, a dump bed trailer that will carry two and a half cubic yards of horse p**p at a time, and a well used 966 Cat loader to scoop up that horse manure and load the trailer. Some they spread with a tractor and a manure spreader, some gets dumped in a pile somewhere else.

(I have heard it said that a ton of hay in the Tuscarora of the early nineteen hundreds, when the horse was the primary source of work and transportation, hay was nearly the same cost as it is today.)

According to casual observation and rudimentary calculation, I’m fairly certain that for every ton of hay that Old Horse Behind the House consumes she will defecate one and a half tons of hoses p**p. That old mare likes to hang out around the manger next to the hay during the winter months, and as a result she p**ps in one place quite often. Just to look, right now, that horses f***s are piled up near mid-calf in places. Right now it is a soggy ten pounds per shovel full. In the early spring of the year, after all is good and dry, it will weigh about two pounds per heaped shovel full.

That’s twenty square point shovels full per barrow. (The two-wheel kind of wheelbarrow is the best as far as weight and mobility goes, but that Poly plastic bed will wear out pretty fast if you mix even small amounts of concrete.) Takes about one and a half minutes of springtime enthusiasm at the beginning of the vernal equinox, when the body is fresh and new to fill that barrow. It takes about five minutes two hours later when the body starts to tire and gets old. When the back says it doesn’t want to bend over anymore, and the sweat pours down

About four inches of that particular horse p**p – nicely tilled into the soil about twelve inches deep – will give that native soil a Organic Mater reading of about six percent according to laboratory analysis.

(Take a gallon jug and put in a quart of good soil. Fill the rest of that jug with water, stir it up well with an old spoon or a stick, and observe what floats and what doesn’t when the sediment settles. The stuff floating near the surface of the water is organic matter. The sediments on the bottom of the jug are the minerals that make up the majority of the soil. About two inches of floating materiel is about right.)

Let us see….? One barrow full of horse p**p – ground down fine under the tires of Lilly’s tractor when she delivers hay – is about two and a half cubic feet. So… that barrow full will cover about three feet of a four foot wide garden row four inches deep. That means that a twenty-foot row can be covered with that Old Horses p**p in about an hours hard hu***ng and a ten-minute rest.

I think I’ll put the Chicken Tractor on that little plot of earth and see what those four old stewing hens can do. I’m fairly sure they will find plenty to keep them busy, scratching, digging, pecking, and making their contribution.

Somebody once asked me if horse manure contained many w**d seeds. I would suppose that the hay the horse is fed has a lot to do with it. (“Weeds begate w**ds.” I think that statement is in the Bible somewhere.) If a drop of water falls from the sky or the sweat of the brow and lands on the soil there will be a w**d sprout and take root, that is a fact.

I really get a kick looking at pictures of Market Gardeners the magazines and seed catalogs sometimes. Those photographs of those well groomed and nicely polished individuals standing in a bright leafy green ten acres of garden with no w**ds holding a basket of fine red tomatoes looking as if they had just stepped out of an airplane wearing nice clean formfitting cloths.

The old man loaded up everything that he owned
On a wagon and headed out west
The old woman fearlessly faced the unknown
'Cause she figured he knew what was best
And they settled down hard on a government grant
With six mouths to feed and forty acres to plant

And the rain came down
Like an angel come down from above
And the rain came down
It'll wash you away and there ain't never enough

Fall turned to winter another year gone
Over and over again
Some took their lives from their land and moved on
And some stayed on to plow it back in
And the good Lord he giveth and he taketh away
And the restless shall go and the faithful shall stay

Steve Earl (1982)

01/12/2022

The Paiutes were hunter-gatherers, and moved from place to place frequently as they gathered food for their families. Paiute men hunted deer, elk, buffalo, and small game, and went fishing in the rivers and lakes. Paiute women gathered roots, pine nuts, seeds and fruits.

Wikipedia

Now there is a slight oversimplification if I’ve ever heard one. That little passage makes out as if life out here on the High Desert, in all but very modern times, was like getting out of bed in the morning, getting in a car and going to work. Then driving home at the end of the day to bitch about not being paid enough and asking: “What’s for supper.” And being told “The hamburger helper is on the stove and the beer is in the refrigerator.”

Thinking about phosphorus. The native soils out here are rather poor in that particular ingredient, along with lots of other things. (There is an abundance of Potash. No organic matter. Got to think about iron and suffer. Got to think about a lot of things.) If you want a good fertile, loamy soil you have to build it or buy it.

Phosphorite, phosphate rock, or phosphate rock contains high amounts of phosphate minerals.

Wikipedia

Thing is, even if you can find it west of the Mississippi River, it’s still a rock, and even if it could be ground down fine enough to be easily worked into the soil it still couldn’t be thought of as a fertilizer. It would have to be a part of the soil for about five years while all the microbes that breed and thrive in the organic mater p*e on it and gradually dissolve it into what experts on such things call the soil solution; the stuff hiding in the pours of a good fertile soil a plant wants and needs.

There is a fifty-pound bag of Soft Rock Phosphate (0-3-0) that can be had for around $25.00, plus the shipping cost involved with fifty pounds – the UPS max limit – traveling twelve hundred miles.

A twenty pound bag of composted chicken manure (3-2-2) down at the Wally Mart cost about $35.00 and will probably bring about one twelve by four “already existing” garden plot up to s***f, as far a phosphorus is concerned.

I had a sample of composted horse manure analyzed about seven years or so ago. It was about half a percent plant available phosphorus.

I say composted horse manure, but in actuality it is pretty much where that old horse dropped it. It then gets run over by the tires on Iris’s tractor when she delivers hay. (I wonder if a horse can be trained to p**p in the appropriate places and walk delicately between the rows.)

Thinking about the triple seven; seven Ph, seventy degrees, and better than seven inches of rootball. That’s a good place to begin, or rather a good thing to wish for.

The Ph of our native soils is right up near an eight. Alkaline. That is where the organic mater comes in. In my case that organic matter is the horse manure ground down good and fine with Iris’s tractor tires. That organic mater is going to provide the groceries for that mélange of microscopic life that inhabit a good portion of a healthy soil; those protozoan, bacterium, and little parasitic worms that are going to ingest that organic matter and each other. They will then excrete an acidic waist product that lowers the Ph, just a touch. They will exude an excrement that gnaws on those miniscule boulders that make up a fine sandy loam, releasing those minerals into that soil solution, making them available to the plant.

An old man with a bum hip that I’m going to call Billy Long for right now lives in the desert just west of Blue Mountain. He hauls his water in fifty-gallon barrels in the back of his truck. He and his old lady don’t like to see water go to waste, for obvious reasons, so they use a compost toilet and have a bath in a twenty gallon wash tube.

That toilet is a simple device. Basically, a plywood box with a five-gallon bucket inside, and a toilet seat on top. When you have finished your business - go outside in the sage if you can - just add a scoop of sawdust to the bucket and shut the lid. When the bucket is near full the contents are taken out and used to glue the sands together and hold the nutrients and water around that one large apple tree that constitutes Billy’s front yard.

The soils in that place are mostly coarse and sandy, with very little to recommend them for agriculture. The water is deep and the ground is sand, growing mostly sage and grass. Rangeland… with exception of that one apple tree.

Trace Elements: They are those multivitamins that many people take in the morning with the first cup of coffee. A plant needs Trace Elements also. There are the eleven of the most needed minerals. The trace elements are the rest of those naturally occurring minerals.

Each plant takes what it needs to grow; nitrogen and carbon out of the atmosphere, and rest of the necessary naturally occurring elements and minerals out of the soil. The plant needs the element to grow. Remove the plant and you remove the elements the plant took up as it was growing. Those soils will eventually show signs of mineral depletion. Maybe the tomato will begin losing its flavor. Maybe the natural axons and hormones produced by the plant as it grows will slow and the plant will slow in growth and become susceptible to pest and disease.

Thinking about Sulfur.

01/12/2022

Out here, we live over what remains of the Lake Lahontan. It used to be a big in Land Sea. Back then we, out here, would have been under about a thousand feet of water and Ichthyosaurs would have been swimming around that old horse behind the house. The lake went under ground about 9000 years go.

Now our well water level was about seventy feet in the spring of the year before irrigation on the farms/ranches south of here begins. During the hot and dry month of October, about three weeks before the first snow, I measured it again. It was eighty-one feet down. Pretty typical for about the last twenty years I would say. I know for sure about the last three. I measured it with a hundred foot tape measure with a float on the end.

Our well is cased to one hundred and twenty feet. When I had that worn out pump replaced, the gentleman running the head rig, old Jim Oslo, who lives out in the sage brush on the south side of Pumpernickel Valley somewhere, measure it again. The pulling rod hit a fine, silty, sand at one ninety-three feet.

The well case is eight inch. Old Warren Scott, who lived around here all his eighty plus years, had the well cable tooled and cased with eight inch to make it easier and whole scads cheaper if it needs to be drilled deeper.

I thought about a two-horse power pump to replace the one horse power that Oslo pulled, but I would have had to wait three days to a week with several low tunnels full of tomatoes and a patch of corn and beans. That and a house full of women and teenagers, and a full time job, with out water for a week wasn’t going to be much fun.

According to the rules, that nearly everyone ignores, the domestic well water right is two-acre feet. (651,702 gallons). Sounds like a lot doesn’t it. The average family of three around these parts is using approximately one hundred fifty gallons per day (150*365= 54,750) per year.

One hundred square feet of lawn at 100 degrees Fahrenheit will transpire nearly all the water that you can pump in the evening without flooding the road.

Call it 625 gallons per day, for ten square feet of green grass lawn, for four months (Intensive) out of the year. That’s around 77,500 gallons per annum, for ten square feet, at 70 degrees. (625*30*4=77,500) Now take a hypothetical lawn of 5000 thousand square feet, and that is 3152 gallons per day. That’s 375,000 gallons to irrigate a lawn – at 70 degrees. Now kick in a whole bunch of hundred degree-days with less than ten percent humidity and start thinking about transpiration and ev***ration, and you see where the whole thing goes.

Where was I…. Oh yeah

The company that sells those pumps say a one horse power Grundfos pump will last ten thousand starts, depending on how turbid your water is. The last one ran for nearly fifteen years.

During the winter months the water from that well appears clear as the glass it is poured into. During the high summer months – when the commercial irrigation south of here is at its peak - there will be a very small amount of very fine red or black sediment. (000000001 % as a rough guess.)

The hot water heater has been replaced once. It got all gunked up on the bottom, the propane flame wasn’t heating the water, then it got a whole in the bottom and started leaking. I drain and flush the new one once or twice a summer. Sometimes a get I lot of “Gunk” and sometimes I get none.

I had a water test run on the well water about six years ago. I sent it to Western Laboratories over in Parma Idaho. The results of that test kind of surprised me, considering the soils at the bottom of this dried up lake bed are rather alkaline, loaded with calcium and potash. The results given on that test basically said the water I had given them was nearly like that in the plastic bottles bought at the Wally Mart. (Exaggeration, but you get the idea.)

I had a fish tank filled with that water and some tough fish years ago. It tested harder than the very dirt it came out of with one of those cheap off the shelf colorimetric test kits bought for that purpose.

I think the labtech kicked the sample I sent over and tested some water out of the faucet over in the Boise Valley.

I worked with a gentleman that lived out Rose Creek a ways who couldn’t keep a hot water heater more than a year. His hot water heaters were electric and the heating elements would scale up so bad in such a short time, the elements couldn’t be pulled and replaced. That and the fifty gallon tank was so scaled up it wouldn’t hold more than twenty five gallons of hot water.

I ran a sample for him and the conductivity went completely off the scale. His water was nearly as hard as seawater. He had to build a little addition to his adobe and install high-end water softener to make the hot water heater last a little longer.

You’ve got to think about the wind out here. Sometimes it blows tumblew**ds into the garden Fence. Sometimes it doesn’t blow at all. (I would suppose that would be the reason those of us in this little part of the world do not see those monstrous Pin Wheels when we look out the window in the morning.)

The wind ether does not blow, or it smashes into things. It can, and will, bang away at the garage in such a niggling manner that the nails will begin working their way out of the garage siding, and of course it’s going remove a few shingles on the roof every once in a while. It can, and will, blow sprinkled irrigation water to nothing more than a v***r and into the next field if it takes a fancy.

That wind is a desiccating thing.

That wind loves to grab hold of anything plastic – row covers, low tunnels, high tunnels, drip tape, and the neighbors single use plastic shopping bags – and hang them up in the barbwire of a fence to the east.

Folks in town, in the neighborhoods with nice little back yards, with high wooden fences, can grow things like grapes and asparagus, and if they can get good exposure to the southern sun, with a little dappled shade from an old elm tree mixed in, they can grow a fairly good crop of Brandy Wine tomatoes.

There are a few folks out here that like to fort up behind a cedar fence. Those fences will break the wind, for sure, but the summer sun and the winter winds will eventually work their will, and the fence planking will start curling and splitting around the nail heads. Then those fences will start losing the battle and will eventually collapse one piece at a time.

The wind usually emanates out of the South West, except when it decides not to. It can get itself focused when it comes around the corner of what folks around here call the Bloody Run Hills and cruise along about the valley bottoms at twelve miles per hour with a kick every so often of about thirty, I’ll wager. (That is what it says on the weather channel, at any rate.)

There are those that grow things quite well in this part of the High Desert. Things like corn, alfalfa and spuds. Barley does well.

There is a place called China Garden situated on a fairly stable stream

I know the best way to grow a lawn or garden is to irrigate it by hand. Give each little plot, patch and plant, just what it needs, when it needs it, and then just a little extra. That is the best way.

I’m thinking the second-best way is to flood irrigate the native soil with lots of organic matter in it. That would be the best way to do it without forming an alliance with plastics and organic fertilizers. (Fifty pounds of Blood Meal (12-2-2) cost $80.00, delivered… UPS, or a person can pay $15.00 for a two-pound bag at the Wally Mart.)

Dig a shallow trench and plant a strong plant with a good rootball in the shallow trench, then flood trench with a light compost tea.

The soil will need a good peculation rate until about a foot down, the way I got it figured.

I have that foot of good soil. In places, where the earthworms have taken a good hold, it is even deeper.

There is a restrictive layer about a foot to a foot and a half down in most places. Not a caliche. Not an impenetrable soil layer. Just a layer that will slow the downward flow of the water. The water will soften the layer and percolate down, it just takes time. That’s a good thing, to my way of thinking. The water can be gauged so that restrictive layer will hold just the right amount of moisture and nutrient near the plants roots.

The roots of that plant will bounce of that restrictive layer, taking what it desires in the way of minerals as it goes, until it reaches the mound of earth between trenches where the major portion of the nutrients lay.

The shade of the plants in the trenches will shade those trenches, and the irrigation water when added. Thus conservation of water underneath and, and since the plants in those trenches are low to the ground, and on the east side of a stickery and easy to grow current bush, they will be reasonably well protected from the wind.

01/12/2022

You’ve got to think about the wind out here. Sometimes it blows tumblew**ds into the garden Fence. Sometimes it doesn’t blow at all. (I would suppose that would be the reason those of us in this little part of the world do not see those monstrous Pin Wheels when we look out the window in the morning.)

The wind ether does not blow, or it smashes into things. It can, and will, bang away at the garage in such a niggling manner that the nails will begin working their way out of the garage siding, and of course remove a few shingles on the roof every once in a while. It can, and will, blow sprinkled irrigation water to nothing more than a v***r and into the next field if it takes a fancy.

That wind is a desiccating thing. A stiff little breeze on an all to typical low humidity day can blow all the moisture a tomato plant can transpire into the hungry dry atmosphere and cause the plants stomata to close good and tight and wait for a better day. A day not likely to come in the months of July and August.

That wind loves to grab hold of anything plastic – row covers, low tunnels, high tunnels, drip tape, and the neighbors single use plastic shopping bags – and hang them up in the barbwire of a fence to the east.

Folks in town, in the neighborhoods with nice little back yards, with high wooden fences, can grow things like grapes and asparagus, and if they can get good exposure to the southern sun, with a little dappled shade from an old elm tree mixed in, they can grow a fairly good crop of Brandy Wine tomatoes.

There are a few folks out here that like to fort up behind a cedar fence. It will break the wind, for sure, but the summer suns and the winter winds will eventually work their will, and the fence planking will start curling and splitting around the nail heads. Then those fences will start losing the battle with the sun and wind one piece at a time.

The wind usually emanates out of the South West, except when it decides not to. It can get itself focused when it comes around the corner of what folks around here call the Bloody Run Hills and cruise along about twelve miles per hour with a kick every so often of about thirty, I’ll wager. (That is what it says on the weather channel, at any rate.)

I know the best way to grow a lawn or garden is to irrigate it by hand. Give each little plot, patch and plant, just what it needs, when it needs it, and then just a little extra. That is the best way.

I’m thinking the second-best way is to flood irrigate the native soil with lots of organic matter in it. That would be the best way to do it without forming an alliance with plastics and organic fertilizers. (Fifty pounds of Blood Meal (12-2-2) cost $80.00 delivered, or a person can pay $15.00 for a two-pound bag at the Wally Mart.)

Dig a shallow trench and plant a strong plant with a good rootball in the shallow trench, then flood trench with a light compost tea.

The soil will need a good peculation rate until about a foot down, the way I got it figured.

I have that foot of good soil. In places, where the earthworms have taken a good hold, it is even deeper.

There is a restrictive layer about a foot to a foot and a half down in most places. Not a caliche. Not an impenetrable soil layer. Just a layer that will slow the downward flow of the water. The water will soften the layer and percolate down, it just takes time. That’s a good thing, to my way of thinking. The water can be gauged so that restrictive layer will hold just the right amount of moisture and nutrient near the plants roots.

The roots of that plant will bounce of that restrictive layer, taking what it desires in the way of minerals as it goes, until it reaches the mound of earth between trenches where the major portion of the nutrients lay.

The shade of the plants in the trenches will shade those trenches, and the irrigation water when added. Thus conservation of water, a sheltered humidity underneath and, and since the plants in those trenches are low to the ground, and on the east side of a stickery and easy to grow current bush, they will be reasonably well protected from the wind.

07/14/2020

Homesteading in the Twenty First Century

I would suppose that a person would get the idea that the High Desert is rather contrary to growing things a person can put on the table and eat. This is a fact, and very hard to argue with, but a long ways from true.

The best question to asked is who has succeeded and what did they grow. Do the what, how, and why thing. Do the then thing. Think about those that came before.

An Old Timer, a man that was born in a place called Golconda in about 1946 pointed out a few of them as we were driving to and from our regular jobs.

China Garden is one. I know where it is/was, but that is about all. I have heard that much of the food grown for the oriental population in this little part of the world in the late 1880s was grown there. It was located back in a canyon watered by a creek flowing the north side of Bloody Run Peak. A person can still make out the terracing,’ a few fence post, and deep soils in that place, but that is about it. Even the local museum has little if any information on it.

Another place that Jerome pointed out was a place called Mormon Gardens, about six miles north of the city center. He pointed out one of the Root Cellars, that has long since collapsed, dug into the hillside behind an old looking dwelling.

Go back a little further. Say two hundred and fifty years ago. Go back and have a good look at what the natives in this land used to do to live, and make the assumption that life was not entirely a life of hunting and gathering.

Then think back just a little further. Go back about 9000 years and wonder what those living and evolving around that big lake that covered most of what is now Nevada and take a look at the climactic conditions. Think about agriculture then. Think about how it evolved into what it is now

Think about Lake Lahontan.

(Surprisingly, the watershed feeding Lake Lahontan is not thought to have been significantly wetter during its highstand than it is currently. Rather, its desiccation is thought to be mostly due to increase in the ev***ration rate as the climate warmed.[citation needed] Wikipedia)

Then then there is this:

(Recent computer simulations (using the DSSAM Model[5] and other techniques) indicate, if precipitation and ev***ration rates within the watershed were maintained at their historical yearly maximum and minimum, respectively, and if diversions of the Truckee River ceased, the Ice Age extent of Lake Lahontan might return. Wikipedia)
(C.M.Hogan, Marc Papineau et al. Development of a dynamic water quality simulation model for the Truckee River, Earth Metrics Inc., Environmental Protection Agency Technology Series, Washington D.C. (1987)

Then take a look at what might be down the road a little ways.

07/10/2020

Around here the soils are said to be a Fine Sandy Loam. I dug the hole in the Native Soil and ran the moisture retention test myself as a part of the Soil Science course I was taking down at the local community college. Then I sent a mixed grid sample to Western Laboratories in Parma Idaho and the results concurred.
That soil test sent off to Western Laboratories also gave the mineralization characteristics - those naturally occurring elements that plants need to grow – of that native soil. There is an over-abundance of calcium and potassium, and not much in the way of Phosphorus, Iron, sulfur… etc. and almost no Organic Matter
Soils with good organic matter grow things the best. I know that from personal experience.

Then there is the growing season. The USDA allows we have ninety days. I’d give that a maybe. Most plants vascular don’t like to grow when it gets too hot, or it gets too cool, and we usually get plenty of both.

I would suppose that a person would get the idea that the High Desert is rather contrary to growing things a person can put on the table and eat. This is a fact, and very hard to argue with, but a long ways from true.
The best question to asked is who has succeeded and what did they grow. Do the what, how, and why thing.

07/08/2020

Homesteading in the Twenty First Century
A Dissertation on the High Desert III

Climatic conditions around this small part of the world very. From dry and sandy to alpine. (Samuel Clements and a partner of his set a pine forest on fire on the shores of Lake Tahoe somewhere around the eighteen eighties.)

Then there are the lands farther south. I guess when a person thinks of Southern Nevada they think of La Vegas. Try thinking of a Joshua Tree. Get out of your air-conditioned car and think of this.

We turn away to face the cold, enduring chill
As the day begs the night for mercy love
The sun so bright it leaves no shadows
Only scars carved into stone
On the face of earth
The moon is up and over One Tree Hill
We see the sun go down in your eyes.

Bono (1988)

This part of Nevada is forty-six hundred feet above sea level. The native vegetation is sage and bitter brush. The average rain fall is said to be about a foot a year.

Around here the soils are said to be a Fine Sandy Loam. I dug the hole and ran the moisture retention test myself as a part of the Soil Science course I was taking down at the local community college. Then I sent a mixed grid sample to Western Laboratories in Parma Idaho as a double check and all agreed. That plus I got the mineralization characteristics for the twenty-three natural occurring elements. There is a abundance of calcium and potassium, and there wasn’t much in the way of Phosphorus, Iron, sulfur, and the list goes on.

Then there is to growing season. The USDA allows we have ninety days. I’d give that a maybe. Things don’t like to grow when it gets too hot, and things don’t like to grow when it gets too cool, and we usually get plenty of both.

07/06/2020

Homesteading in the Twenty First Century
A Dissertation on the High Desert II

A few years back the governor of the State of Nevada was told that five more dry winters and parts of the state would be running pretty low on water. He then commissioned a group composed of people that knew about water, permitting, aquifers, and such to tour the states country side and hold townhall meetings to discuss the topic with the local citizenry.

Conjecture on my part: I also think the governor realized that the problem had the potential of becoming very real and he had to do something; after all his advisors on such matters usually know what they are talking about. I also think the purpose of those town-hall meetings was to acquaint the local citizenry of the fact that they should start thinking about water consumption in a different manner.

He also realized that his five-acre lawn was using a two million gallons of water. It was then his landscaper found out that the wrong button had been pushed and corrected the error. Water consumption was cut back to a million gallons. “To set a good example.” Is what the governor said.

There is always the issue of water. If a person was not the first in this part of the country, having settled on the edges of the steams that flow from the canyons of the many high mountains, a person is going to have to incur the expense of a well, and a pump, and the power to drive that pump, and then a person is going to have to settle on the fact that only some of the water at the bottom of that well is theirs. A domestic well High Desert Homesteader should settle on the fact that the two-acre feet of water, which sounds like a lot, isn’t going to be enough to irrigate pasture, or a market garden, and still water a household in the conventional sense.

A domestic well in this part of the world is plumbed into an aquifer that was once a great lake. Now that lake is a pool of water and fine aggregate and between one hundred and twenty to two hundred feet down, and water is everything.
A domestic well entitles a person to two-acre feet. (651,752 gallons) Sounds like a lot doesn’t it. It would fill a hole ten feet wide and ten feet deep and eight hundred and seventy feet long.

Consider this: How much water does the average American family of three use, as an average, per day? Over one hundred gallons per day per person. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U.S._and_Canada)
That’s 328,500 gallons for a family of three. That’s better than an acre foot in a year right there.

(While we’re at it let us consider the amount of water needed to flush a toilet. That’s better than 34,000 gallons per year per a family of three. Wiki.)

Now consider what it takes to water a lawn out here. First consider the fact that a lawn is made up of plants. Then factor in wind, temperature, humidity, and a thing called transpiration. Transpiration being the amount of the water that the roots take up, and the amount water that is passed as a v***r through those little pours on the shaded bottom of that plants leaves.

When a person thinks of a lawn grass they are usually thinking about a plant that has a single stem with a few simple leaves on the very bottom and doesn’t mind being grown close to his neighbor. It’s a monocot. Kind of like a corn, only a lot shorter and you can cut the top off every so often.

Of course one has to factor in the climactic conditions out here on the High Desert. The wind is going to blow and the humidity is going to be low and the temperature is going to be an average of somewhere between 75 and 80 degrees F for about (Maybe) five months per year. Rough figure about one hundred forty gallons or so for every one hundred square feet per day. That comes out to 2100 gallons per day, or 315,000 gallons for the five months that a person will need to water that lawn. Couple domestic use for a family of three, 1500 square foot lawn, and no extras, that’s nearly that two-acre feet. (315000 + 328,500 = 643,500) That’s a little better that 8000 gallons to spare for trees and a garden… and bear in mind that we’re talking about what is called a high cold desert.

Residential water use (also called domestic use, household use, or tap water use) includes all indoor and outdoor uses of drinking quality water at single-family and multifamily dwellings.[2] These uses include a number of defined purposes (or water end uses) such as flushing toilets, washing clothe...