INTRO
One of the things I noticed that was missing at the GW subdivision was serious food production. The obvious reason why this is missing is that there is, at first glance, no water! This is the high desert with little rainfall and hellacious, eyeball shrivellingly dry, winds. The soil has little organic matter and almost nothing grows out here except tumbleweed, sage brush and chamisa.
So how do you grow food out here? As of Sunday December 4, 2005, I do not know.
We have a community well that was required by the fire department in case of a fire on the subdivision. But, at present, it is only capable of 1 gallon per minute via a solar powered water pump set at 550 feet deep (I think). I believe it does not have any batteries and charge controller so it only runs about 6 hours on a sunny day (i.e. about 360 gallons of water/day). Growing food, especially in a very dry and windy climate requires VAST amounts of water for optimum growth and yields crammed into a 4 month growing season. Sooo... at first glance, it appears to be a hopeless task.
But, I beleive it is possible to grow a significant portion of a complete diet for one person for one year out here. It may not be possible every year due to the vagaries of the July/August monsoon season and other rain events. But with some means of storing water when it does come and applying it efficiently when it is needed, it can be done.
There is a book called "The Negev: The Challenge of a Desert" 2nd edition by Evanari, Shanan and Tadmor, published by Harvard University Press in 1982 that shows how it can be done out here. We have a heavy clay soil out here that does not absorb water very rapidly. When a heavy rainfall does come, most of it runs off into arroyos and ends up in the Rio Grande. By diverting this water into swales and cisterns, one can store enough water to grow crops.
The million dollar question is how can you store all that water for use during the ENTIRE growing season without spending a fortune? Most of the people out here have already spent their life fortunes on the construction of their dream home.
As luck would have it, we already have two substantial water catchment ponds right next to the well. One is a semicircular annular ring shaped excavation that can hold 110,000 gallons of water and a "Land Dam" that was created by the construction of a road that was required by the county. In the summer of 2004, the Land Dam created by the aforementioned road filled up and overflowed through a couple of 3 foot diameter culverts to the other side of the road and on to the Rio Grande. For simplicity of calculation, I assumed the pond formed by the land dam was semicircular in shape and had an average depth of 4 feet at crest. Since the "diameter" of the pond is about 400 feet, this comes out to a little over 2 million gallons of water! This oughta be enough to grow some food!
But the question still remains as to how this water can be stored for the spring time planting. The two structures normally get runoff flows during the July/August monsoon season, which is great for the peak of plant growth season. The April/May/June time period is typically very dry and this when you need to have uniform soil moisture on the surface for seed germination. This is also the time when you have eyeball shrivelingly dry, hurricane force springtime winds, which means you need even more water!
Also, here are the water quality test results for the community well!
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