Not much going on this fall.

[Smiles Jr.]

As most of us have agreed, this has been a very trying growing season. I'm usually up to my ears in produce to be dried, canned, processed, pickled, and otherwise put up for the winter.

My biggest disappointment this season has been my apples. I have a small 16 tree orchard that has been an abundant producer for me over the years. Some years I have harvested as many as 100 bushels of plump beautiful apples around this time of the season. This year I got 6 bushels of crummy looking apples. I have been blaming myself for neglecting my trees a little bit last fall and this spring. But I just heard on the radio yesterday that our annual Applefest celebration over in town will not have ANY fresh apples this year. They said that they had contacted 13 apple farms and there are no apples to be found in the area. There will be lots of apple products at the fair (probably store bought stuff) but not the typical wagonloads on display and for sale. Now I don't feel so guilty. They said that we had three devastating weather events this past spring that ruined the apples. And then we had the worst and hottest drought in history here.

Great, huh?

 

[lesa]

Sad. NY State growers lost between 50 and 80 percent of their crops as well. Just won't feel like fall without apples....

 

[897tgigvib]

Droughts sure do underscore the needs of water!

I live at a lake, Lake Pillsbury, that is a reservoir with a dam built in 1924. Scott Dam. It was one of the smaller dams built before the Hoover/Boulder dam as practice for the building of that very major human endeavor, and is a smaller version of the same basic kind of dam.

This reservoir is one of three reservoir type lakes of a system. (There is actually a much smaller 4th reservoir in the system, but the Van Arsdale reservoir is really only a wide spot on the Eel River behind the small concrete diversion dam.) This water system is one of the more complex ones, and at it's making was the first major dual watershed transfer systems.

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There is a part of human history and agriculture where moving water as major community event becomes a cornerstone of civilisation's progress. Water systems created the need for early kingdoms. That is what archeologists find when they try to find early civilisations during the period of the earliest agriculture periods. The time frames are different at different geographical places, but what is usually found are water transfer systems. Canals. When archeologists find evidence of canal structures in Turkey, or northern Chile, they know they will find evidence of an early agricultural civilisation, and usually evidence of local tribal entities that merged, growth of technologies such as fired pottery, and the building of structures in a centralized early city.

Agriculture creates civilisation. The transfer of water allows agriculture to work.

Human history is always on some threshold. Always. Another always thing is, humans will always need water, and that means systems to transfer. We can kid ourselves about what our population is, but we can't kid ourselves about how we need to transfer more water to supply that population.

Building dams and large water storage and transfer systems has been controversial, especially since thinking people consider the ecological effects. Other concerns come into play also, such as the fishing industry and invasive species. We really need to remember that this is the Holocene period, a period that began as the last ice age's glaciers receded, and all deserts expanded, and the temperate portions of this planet expanded. That's 3 things that characterize the Holocene. 1) Glaciers and ice caps recede. 2) All deserts expand. 3) Temperate zones expand.

Deserts are expanding. Humans can and do irrigate portions of deserts. Look at Google maps, satellite view. You see round green spots, Square and rectangular spots that are green, and roads and buildings.

Areas of grassland turn into scrubland and evolve into desert. Deserts are living communities. Plants and animals evolved to thrive in them. In places where the deserts have been the longest there is great diversity. Humans have become a major part of this, affecting the planet's expanding deserts, even the oldest deserts.

We humans need to remember that the deserts are expanding during this Holocene period. We humans have a lot of agriculture and civilisation and cities in large areas that are slowly and or rapidly turning into deserts, whether or not it is believed that global warming caused by humans ourselves has anything to do with this expansion of deserts.

===========

The question of is there enough fresh water in specific regions to transfer and store becomes a very real and important question when prolonged drought turns a place like America's entire midwest into a true desert, or threatens to do that. The great river, the Mississippi, and its great tributaries have been dammed, and great water storage reservoirs are already in place on it. Some more can be done at big costs of money, resources, energy, and to the environment. Big huge and sometimes catastrophic costs to individuals and families too, and other things such as historical spots like the Native American mounds. The fisheries would be altered too.

It really does lead to major controversy.

Far into the future needs to be considered before such a major undertaking would be serious to consider. What about 200 years from now? What about silt fill that always happens? (Yes, I know well about silt fill. I see it every winter as Pillsbury recedes, and it receded early this year because of an early release for the lower Eel River's Salmon run. Silt has increased since last year a lot.)

If gigantic dams were to be made on the Mississippi's watershed, by gigantic, I mean making reservoirs hundreds of miles long and tens of miles wide, and up to hundreds of feet deep, what would the impacts be? The interconnectidness of those impacts would make for a study of complexity itself. It might well be decided not to do it, or it might be decided that decades of preliminary human preparedness would need to be done first.

We humans pipeline crude oil. We have piupelined water in simple ways in the past, and grown more advanced waysto do that all the time. Archimedes invented the screw pipelining water during the time the Greeks had Egypt. It was shaped like an auger and it fit inside a pipe. Manually turned, it pumped water up several feet. Modifications of the concept became the screw. We humans now desalinate ocean water, but it is still energy intensive. Very.

Desalination. Huge pools of salty and mineral and microscopic laden ocean water are heated to make steam which is then condensed to make water. The resulting water is then piped from the coast to inland places where it is needed. Piped uphill that is. That means pumps. The complex physics of that boils down to, that's a lot of electricity or fuel first to heat the water, then to pump the water uphill. Heating the water, that part, is getting less energy intensive. Solar power, mirrors, help a lot to reduce energy use, and soon will be LED heaters that'll probably be called HED, heat emitting diodes, or maybe IRED, infrared emitting diodes. Those are going to happen soon. They'll save on heating costs too. (I have a friend who is a physics student at UC Davis. She may well be the one to develop them.) But so far there is no major way to make pumps more efficient by a similar magnitude. Better bearings and physical designs, and rare earth metals instead of copper windings can make pumps maybe 2 or 3 times more efficient, but 10 or 12 times more efficient is needed.

===========

Meantime midwesterners struggle through drought, groundwater spirit thirsts, and desert spirit watches. Human spirit prays.

 

[curly_kate]

I heard a news report that said that apples are bad all the way up to Michigan. Apparently, apples are bad all over the country.

 

[digitS']

Washington State?

60% of the nation's apples according to the USDA. More value to the state than all of the grain crops, combined. That might be a surprise to people around here. Picking has moved on with even the late varieties coming off the trees now. That must be early and might be a result of quite warm summer with little rain. Plenty of sunshine thru the smoke from the fires .

Here, this will be about 2" of rain for the 3 months of summer with about 1" falling the last week of June . . ! We are still going on the 1/8th inch of August rain that fell 21 August. It looks real possible that we will finish not only summer but the month of September, with nothing to add to that.

It is a little surprising to see how the prospect for apple orchards played such an important part in very local history. I arrived here while there was still a packing house in the valley but, as an example, the only orchard that I know of in "Otis Orchards" amounts to about 5 acres.

The town of Deer Park was supposed to be developed around major apple orchards. The water was taken care of with lots of money invested in an irrigation system. The trees froze out something like the 3rd year after planting and that was the end of that.

Want a picture to hang above your potting bench??? Do a google image search for "fruit crate labels" with the name of your state !

Steve

 

[desertlady]

Theres a big apple farm south of me and heard its not doing well either, apples were smaller too

 

[hoodat]

I'm still waiting for Fall to start around here. We still have Summer temperatures. It is finally getting down to the 80s but we should be in the 70s here this time of year.