 Davis Media Access. Today I have a very special guest with me. His name is Don Shore. He's the host of the KDRT Davis Garden Show live on Thursdays from 12 to 1. Don is a longtime Davis resident in full disclosure. He's also the owner of our next-door neighbor here, Red Barn Nursery, which is celebrating its 35th year. 35 years serving in the Davis community. So Don is our resident expert today to talk a little bit about the Davis water system specifically not how it affects human health which maybe you know a little bit about as well but today we're gonna be talking about how it affects plant health and tree health, all that kind of good stuff. So Don, thanks for coming in. Thank you. I know you just got done with the KDRT show. So tell me, I know you're not a city employee but tell me what you know about the new Davis water system is a little bit of background. Well I wrote an article about it recently so I did get a chance to talk to the city engineers involved in bringing the water here. Right. Davis for many years had all of its water from groundwater from wells from about two dozen shallow-ish wells around the area and then in the last few years had gone to some much deeper wells but in both cases the water was very high in mineral salts and was very alkaline had a high pH and that affects the growth of certain plants that are what we call acid-preferring plants and that's jargon in our trade but plants that evolved in areas with high rainfall, lots of organic material, more acidic soil conditions simply were a challenge to grow in Davis. So before we totally nerd out on plants right quick, tell me a little bit about so we were well watered completely and there was a sys tax, well we won't get into politics. The voters of Davis approved a water project that brings water into Davis from the Sacramento River. So we'll have Sacramento River water, Sacramento River flows from the melting snow in the Sierra. And it's a graduated process like a certain parts of Davis. Yeah there's as of June 2nd 2016 Central Davis and parts of East Davis. I did bring a little map over which you can also see on the Davis City of Davis website. Okay. That's the blue portion in the map if the camera wants to zoom in on that. Have already started receiving predominantly surface water, what we call surface water, river water. Starting June 2nd of this year. Right. And was it sort of just like an on-off type thing? Yep they actually said look at your water you'll see bubbles in it and we did that day see lots of bubbles in the water. That's Central Davis and parts of East Davis. In September the rest of East Davis and South Davis will begin to receive the surface water or river water. Those terms are used interchangeably. And in December the entire city which includes all of you folks west of 113 on Stonegate will be receiving river water. And tell me again El Mercero how is it? El Mercero is part of South Davis as far as this goes. They are tying into the city water system. So basically it's within the city limits and the people in Willow Bank and El Mercero will be getting predominantly river water. I say predominantly because they're going to be mixing it with groundwater or well water. Those are also used interchangeably. So are they current for this for the places that already have the new water? Are they already mixing it? Yes. And the engineers tell me that most of the time it'll be about 70% river water, about 30% groundwater. By comparison Woodland which is building the same system with us is going to be getting 100% river water. So is there a reason for that do you know of? Yes I do know the exact reason they chose to pay for it. In order to cut costs the city of Davis decided to reduce their portion of the program. City of Woodland paid more and they'll go to 100% have already gone to 100% river water. We'll have the odd situation where the water in Woodland will be better quality than the water in Davis. Right. It will not always be a 70-30% blend. It'll depend on the water year whether it's a drought, whether it's a high rainfall year. The exact proportions will vary and the engineer told me that there might be a time he could conceive of where it's a dry year and our water rights run out early. We might go completely back to the well water in say the month of November that year. Interesting. When it wouldn't be you're getting in the landscape. I didn't know that so it is variable. It will vary from year to year. Is it ever possible to go to 100% surface water? Probably not in Davis because we only chose to buy 40% of the water rights. That sets the stage for changes in people's plants, trees, and whatnot. Well first noticeable thing you probably won't need your your water softer anymore you know indoor. So that's indoor stuff. For taste wise. Tell me what plants previously suffered under the previous 100% well water Davis region. Some of the things that are very popular in Sacramento. So camellia is the Sacramento is the camellia city. We're always challenging to have been challenging to grow here. They don't like the high pH or alkalinity of our water and consequently of our soil. So very familiar plants like camellias, azaleas, gardenias, hydrangeas, blueberries, Japanese maples are some that people know and recognize that have always been challenging to grow here. So the pH was higher so above seven. Well and there's another bit to that story. They're going to keep the pH higher. Okay. They're going to buffer it back up there. They're adding sodium hydroxide to the water which you know as lye in order to buffer the pH up there. Okay why are you doing this? We're going to all this trouble to bring this good water and there are thousands of miles of old iron pipe in Davis and in Wibble. And if you run a lower pH water through them you get iron oxide and you get visible stuff in the water. Nothing leads to more complaints to a water district than visible stuff in the water. So they're going to keep the pH buffered up for the pipe system. That'll be a minor issue that gardeners can deal with quite readily. What we won't have in the water is all the calcium, magnesium, manganese, all these other dissolved salts that have made the water so hard and made it so challenging to bring that pH down. What did you previously have to do to amend either the soil or deal with those high salts? You would add a lot of organic material but the main thing I'd add was a lot of soil sulfur. You had significant amounts of sulfur and you had to do that very regularly. You had to do that seasonally, monthly in the case of what we call the acid-loving plants like the chameleas. There are some beautiful chamelea plants around Davis but their owners typically are fussing at them. They're giving them special fertilizers on a regular basis. What about the edible plants? The big one will be blueberries which have always been a challenge. You think about the places blueberries grow, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, you know places where it's naturally more acidic. They're very easy there. Here they've always been a challenge and people do them and I'm always telling them add two to three cups of sulfur for each plant when you plant it. Add all this organic stuff, plant them in peat moss, you know fertilize the bed every season and you won't have to do that as often. So now you're just telling them throw it in the ground and I don't know. Turn that stuff in, throw the sulfur on the ground periodically because the pH is going to be adjusted up. It'll be much easier to correct the pH that they're they're buffering. So that's the main as far as edible plants, that's the main difference. That's the big one. I think we may get people trying things like currents, huckleberries, things that we've never even tried here before. Yeah, we've never been able to grow gooseberries, you know things that you simply don't think of in the valley are things that some gardeners will try and I will say experiment because remember 30 percent of the water is still coming out of the well. So it won't be perfect but it'll be better. We're somewhat at the beholden to the engineers of David, the water engineers. The water rights that are available, that's right from year to year is really what it'll boil down to. And drought year might be more, drought year might lint itself to more wells. Yeah, from a general planning standpoint what we've come to now is a case where we'll have surface water almost all the time and we'll have the well water in the case of a severe drought. So we'll be better situated than a lot of water districts are but that well water when we have to go back to it will be have that higher mineral salt content. So one of the effects it has in the landscape, this is a gardenia plant. Gardenias are in that acid-loving plant category. We can get a close-up of this. This plant came in from a grower that I buy from down further in the valley where they have hard well water and this leaf shows the classic effects of hard water late in the season of iron deficiency, that intravenal chlorosis where the veins are green and the leaf is yellow between the veins. So why would have an iron deficiency if it's... Because the hard water locks up the iron in the soil, the plant can't take it up. And this is a chronic problem in Davis on a lot of plants, gardenias, mire lemons, common shrubs like Escolonia. We'll show this at the end of the season, make them rather unsightly. This came in about a month ago to my store. We've been watering it with Davis water. Now the new surface Davis water, we're in the part of town that's getting the good water and I've noticed the new leaves are already coming out green and aren't showing the iron. So for those UC Davis scientists watching this, this is a highly unscientific method that we're using here to determine the simple observation. This is just a starting point that the chlorosis problem, the iron deficiency essentially solved itself once we began irrigating this with the better quality water we're now getting. That's kind of exciting. These are plants that, gardenias are in that category. People love them for the fragrant blossoms, the fact that they, you know, they give these amazing blossoms all through the summer time. But a chronic late summer chlorosis has been an issue with them. That should be much less of an issue. Common plants like Myra lemon. Lots of people like to grow Myra lemon. I was just going to ask about trees. Yeah, citrus in general have often shown this late summer chlorosis. It makes them a little less vigorous. We won't have as much of that problem. Then this late summer chlorosis, you call it, it kind of also looks like the leaves are dying for winter. But I don't know if that's it. It can be a concern because obviously a leaf that's turned yellow in that part isn't photosynthesizing. So it obviously is a stress on the plant. We run into that a lot with the citrus late in the season. We would like to see them healthier and greener. We always had people feeding monthly, feeding, fertilizing seasonally implying sulfur. You should be able to get by with a lot less of that. So a lot of the ornamental plants will be prettier. They'll actually look better. So that leads me to my next question. What about some of the landscaping plants that the say landscaping trees that we have planted? Davis, I don't know how much of them are actually watered by say city water. But what about the landscaping trees? I don't know. I don't know the types around there. Maybe Mulberry or these types. There have been a few that we've never recommended because of the water quality. Tupelo. People from the south who know that. It's a beautiful tree. It gets very chronic iron chlorosis here. Liquid ambers, they've got some issues. But we've never sold them much in Davis because of this water quality problem. Many of the maples will show that kind of problem. They should look better. So they should be better choices here. And some of the popular trees like the dogwoods and Japanese maples. Now Japanese maples, lots of people grow them. They'll have a lot of this kind of summer problem. That should basically clear up. I'm still dubious about dogwoods because there's one other issue. They are salt sensitive. Dogwoods are typically a tree that you'd find in a forest that's getting a lot of acidic leaf litter. People from the east coast know them. Beautiful summer bloom on them. People come out here. You'll see them in Sacramento. They'll come into my store and other nurseries. Want to buy them. We'd all say, oh, don't really recommend that here. Maybe we can. We'll want a few intrepid gardeners to try them and let us know a couple of years later how they do. Because there is the issue that we still will have some percentage of our water will be a hard water. I'm wondering if the are the master. Are you plugged into the master gardener scene and are they already trying some of these things that you know? I think people will try them. This is the year when the water is coming in. We're really just getting it now. The other comment I would make is that it's going to take a winter or two of good rainfall to clear out 100 years of salts out of the soil. I mean, we've been watering with well water here for decades. Some of these salts are very soluble and a good rainfall will clear them out, but others will take a while. We have a lot of boron, a lot of calcium, a lot of magnesium, a lot of those things. Plants actually need those in small quantities. We've got way more than what plants need in our soil typically. We need a couple of good rainfall years to get the soil conditions better for some of those plants. A very good point. A couple more questions. One is that are you going to be, is there information available for Davis people or Davis experts such as yourself to find out how much of the water, what percentage is well water, what is that sort of just. I found the city engineers very helpful on that. They can't tell you day to day what the percentages are. They do publish the water quality tests they do on an annual basis. Of course that won't give you the data you're looking for. Some of the water purification companies are monitoring the water quality, have sent me some of their results. It's something that a gardener may wish to do a soil test for at the beginning of the season, at the end of the season. See how they stand on calcium and magnesium and things like that. Soil tests can be very useful. They're also very technical and a little hard for the average gardener to understand. So they bring them to me and we talk about them. But in terms of day to day information they will not have that. In terms of general information the city website is very helpful. That's where I pulled the map from that we talked about earlier. And I wrote an article on the subject earlier which is linked on my business website. And a couple more question or final question is this doesn't really affect many agricultural operations really at all? No not well unless somebody wants to start a blueberry farm in the area. Right. There's a big one down by Stockton. They certainly grow here. And it has to be within city limits or using city water of course. Yes those of us who live out in the country will not have the good quality water that you folks and down are going to have. Because we're still using wells. Projects like the cannery they have they're going to have a little farm or something out there. They'll be using city water. And they'll be able to grow blueberries if they want to out there. That's going to be the big one. There might be influx of gooseberries and blueberries at the farmers market coming up in their brave new world. Cranberries. What we're talking about is things that need acidity versus alkalinity. And you get way down to the low end of the pH scale. Right. Things that really needed acidic blueberries. You know I mentioned cranberries. You know they grow them in bogs where the pH is five. For those of you who are familiar with the term the pH of our water is about 8.1. Okay. Neutral is about seven. So the water has been alkaline and will continue to be alkaline. But you can buffer that quite readily. It'll be a lot easier to bring the pH down than it has been before. Right and specifically that pH affects mineral or salt. Mineral uptake. Yeah. Don thanks for coming in. Always great to talk to you about this type of information. Since if she falls so closely you have to. And for the KDRT show and for your business. Anyway thanks for coming in. And thanks for tuning in on In the Studio. This has been my name is Jeff Shaw and I've been talking to Don Shore. If you'd like more information about the new Davis water and how it affects plants. Don is available on daily basis. You can call in on this KDRT show Thursdays at 12 p.m. You can also go to the website that you see on the screen right there. daviscardshow.com. Thank you very much for tuning in.