Making your own Seasonal Desert River

Okay, listen.  When I first conjured up this post, I thought “I’m going to make the coolest graphic showing how your roof can boost your landscape power.”  Then I came up with what you see above and below, which is a bunch of nonsensical arrows and squiggly lines and other crap.  So I’m sorry about that.  I really meant for it to be a work of art.  Maybe next time.  What you see above is the creation of a “rain water course”, which simply means a fun and useful path that water will take when it falls from the sky and moves from a gutter into a garden.  You should do this.  Especially while it’s not 110 degrees and digging is something you can do without hallucinating (more on that real soon).

This much is definitely true: your roof harnesses a lot of power here in the desert.  You probably have 1000+ square feet of roof that gathers our infrequent rain and then promptly spits it out into a healthy strip of weeds when the water falls off into the dirt.  I imagine you have some specimens that reach 3+ feet in the summer.  Way to go!  Those weeds love you, and they’ll come back until the end of time.

If you’d rather use the roof/rain water for a better purpose, your first step is to get gutters and downspouts.  I’m about to add some to our house, so more on that when I install them.  Here’s why I’m going to do it: my 1000 square foot roof can gather 600+ gallons of water in a 1 inch rainstorm.  Rather than let it land in a tidy strip of weeds, I prefer to channel it into a recessed basin containing (native) trees, shrubs, and flowers.  They’ll get a nice deep drink that can sustain them for a long time – potentially months.  And it means you (and I) can be that much more hands-off with your landscape – everyone loves that part.

So that’s what this drawing actually shows.  I’m working with a client that is interested in using water as smartly as possible, so we’re adding gutters, downspouts, “pop-up” drains (another post on that), and the water will flow through a course that sustains lots of different cacti, shrubs and trees.  Brad Lancaster has written a boatload about this subject, so I suggest looking up his work if you want to know more.  Or, give me a call and we can start designing a water course that sustains your desert landscape.    I promise it will make a huge difference in the livelihood of your plants, and you’ll feel super accomplished about not having that weed strip.