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[Don Bowen <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

At 10/15/2006, you wrote:
> >I often ask them if they
> >were ever in Modoc county in the winter...
>
> It snows almost every winter in San Diego County on Mt Palomar.  Los Angles
> County gets snow in the mountains and desert.


Don Bowen              Awl Knotted Up                       KI6DIU
http://www.braingarage.com
My travel journal
http://www.braingarage.com/Dons/Travels/journal/Journal.html

I am omnivagant.  
> From erthnsky AT bellsouth.net  Sun Oct 15 18:02:07 2006
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Bill Jones wrote:

> That's not nearly enough to keep grass green.  Maybe it's just that
> I'm color-blind, or something.>

Grasses will surely die out in a drought.  There's probably not much you
can do about that.  That may mean that raising goats would be easier
than raising sheep, or that you have to buy hay during the dry months,
but you gotta find a work-around.

 All those resevoirs and rivers
> > are only there because of the snowmelt.  Where in the world did you
> > get such a ludicrous idea as there is no snowmelt from the Coastal
> > Range?

> It could be that our tallest Mountain in the county is too short to
> have any serious glacial snowmelt.

Yeah, but you made a general statement about the whole Coast Range, not
just your county.


> This place is heaven, compared to S. California.  I guess theoretical
>  discussions of people cope in dry areas are just beyond you.  I'd
> never leave the West Coast, and no one wants to freeze either.

Your place, from previous posts, sounds nice to me, better than some
places in the country, for sure.

> If you look at this map you'll see that every place you go out west,
>  there's less than one inch of rain for all of July.  That's
> one-quarter the amount it takes to keep gardens and pastures green
> (generally accepted to be about an inch per week).

Yeah, but Bill, EVERYONE has a dry season or a wet season.  Some places
get so much rain that it gets too muddy to grow anything.  It's the
opposite problem.  Lynn can tell you that.  You just have to figure out
a way to even things out.
Perhaps you can't grow or maintain a forest or orchard without
irrigation in your location, but with some planning, you might be able
to mitigate how much you have to supplement water.  Your conifers are
building soil, it is just that the terrain is so new, geologically
speaking, that they haven't built much soil, and what is built is washed
away by the steep terrain during the rainy season.  If the Incas can
grow things on the slopes of Machu Picchu, surely there is a way for you
to overcome your climate deficiencies, too.  It might come down to
hauling buckets of collected rainwater to your trees once a week, but
it's gotta be possible.
My pasture burns out in the summer, too, and we get about 3 inches of
rain even in our driest month (October).  A lot depends on your grasses
and having a good mix, and I have no clue as to what grasses are native
to your area.  Another factor is overgrazing and choosing the wrong
animals for the land.  It's not helping my pasture any to have the
horses and donkey out there.  It's being taxed.

Bev

--
BevanRon of EarthNSky Farm   NW Georgia USDA Zone 7
34.498N 85.076W    Bev is Earth, Ron is Sky