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 Good morning, and please read carefully. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver made it through the month of June without a single day in the 90s; on Wednesday, July 1, the high was 92°. And Wednesday evening cooler air blasted in, bringing overnight rain showers and a high of only 79° on Thursday - and lovely sleeping weather.
Warmth returned yesterday - just in time for the long weekend, although we also have forecasts for natural fireworks, with thunderstorms predicted each day. I do love the thunderstorms, as long as they don't bring hail.
On Wednesday a swallowtail butterfly came to visit the giant catmint in the front yard, and stayed around posing for a while. Let me know which shot you like best.
In Orange |
 As part of DK Greenroots, I was going to do a session on composting, but the news here in Colorado - and the reporting on it - changed my mind.
On Monday morning, as I drank my coffee and read the New York Times, I found an article headlined It's Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado. I read the article carefully, with great interest, and noted in particular, this paragraph:
Here in Colorado, the old law created a kind of wink-and-nod shadow economy. Rain equipment could be legally sold, but retailers said they knew better than to ask what the buyer intended to do with the product.
"It's like being able to sell things like smoking paraphernalia even though smoking pot is illegal," said Laurie E. Dickson, who for years sold barrel-and-hose systems from a shop in downtown Durango.
State water officials acknowledged that they rarely enforced the old law. With the new laws, the state created a system of fines for rain catchers without a permit; previously the only option was to shut a collector down.
(emphasis added)
 When the Polish Princess got to the office on Monday morning, she said that she had heard on the morning news that it would be legal for us to use rain barrels to collect rainwater. I related to her my reading of the New York Times article, which indicated to me there were limitations to the law - besides, it just didn't see logical to me that the legislature would scrap a century's worth of water laws and rights without some limitation. Being good legal office goddesses, the Princess and I started researching what changes to the law were being actually made, not just what was being reported on the morning newscasts.
As I've explained before in garden blogging, water rights are a huge deal in Colorado: we have a separate court system just for the enforcement of water rights; lawsuits can run for years, and damages, in the form of a requirement of replace the water used illegally over the years or decades, can be very high. The water running in the Colorado River all belongs to someone - and if you don't have senior water rights, you are SOL.
In recent years, it was discovered that many farmers on the eastern plains who relied on well water actually were tapping not aquifers, but nearby rivers - they were required to find the means to replenish the water their wells had taken in the past, going back decades. As reported in the Denver Post, the requirement to pay back the water debt has driven many farmers off the land - especially those who had waited too long to purchase water rights and found themselves priced out of the market due to the explosive growth of the Front Range urban corridor in recent years.
This is the background of the new "water harvesting" laws which were passed by the Colorado legislature. Some of the regulations make it easier for farmers to find sources from which to purchase water rights to repay their water debts, and forgive the debts pre-dating 1974 (yeah, I know, fucking 35 years ago!). Senate Bill 09-080 is pointed directly at rural residents, for supplementing their water supply for very limited purposes. To be eligible for a permit, one must not be connected to, or able to be connected to, a water system serving more than three single family dwellings; the water use is limited to:
(A) ordinary household purposes;
(b) fire protection;
(c) the watering of poultry, domestic animals, and livestock on farms and ranches; or
(d) the irrigation of not more than one acre of gardens and lawns.
 A separate piece of legislation, House Bill 09-1129, creates a pilot program to evaluate "water harvesting" in residential or mixed-used developments across the state, especially in areas that face "renewable water supply challenges". This program is limited to 10 new developments and will run for 10 years, to study the actual rate of water diversion and whether or not "water harvesting" is feasible within the restrictions of ensuring that current senior water right holders retain their full measure of water. The New York Times article points to a study in Douglas County, Colorado which indicated that 97% of rainfall never made it to a water way, being lost to plant use, evaporation, or naturally occurring catchments.
What I found extremely dismaying about the initial reporting on these legislative changes is that the traditional media - yes, even the local traditional media - were not fully, indeed, not even glancingly, explaining these limitations in their initial reportage. Indeed, even the Denver Post relied on verbiage produced by the Associated Press staff writer, rather than have their own "journalists" fully analyze the story; the New York Times article was more thorough than what coverage was available locally.
The upshot is that an estimated 300,000 of Colorado's 5 million residents will be able to apply for permits to harvest rainwater: a mere drop in the bucket.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your gardens?
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