We have some neighbors, the folks at Taber Ranch a bit south of us in the town of Capay, whose family has been tracking the Capay Valley weather for 137 years. According to their records, there have only been three years in that period where there’s been a March without any rain, one of those years being 2026.
When it comes to rain and precipitation, it’s important to remember that there’s no such thing as average rainfall in California; we’re usually swinging between extremes. As Mark Arax writes in The Dreamt Land, there’s no such thing as average or normal rainfall. “Drought is California; flood is California. The lie is the normal.”
That being said, average rainfall for Guinda is about 22 inches a year, and despite the rain-free March, that’s about where we’re at for this rainy season. Statewide, snowpack levels are below normal, but our surfacewater source, Cache Creek, comes from Clearlake and Indian Valley Reservoir, which are both rain-fed, not dependent on snow. In a normal year, we use surface water from Cache Creek from April to October, constituting about 2/3 of our annual water use. We use groundwater pumped up via wells for fields that don’t have access to the creek, and for periods of time when we can’t put a pump in the creek, including during extreme drought when there have been no releases of reservoir water in Cache Creek, as happened in 2022. When using groundwater, given the uncertainty of the amounts that we have to draw on, we are conservative about our use.
We don’t take the rain for granted and appreciate the 1.1 inches of rain last week and the 1.6 inches of rain the week before. Between the rains, we’ve had some high winds that have wicked away moisture from the top of the surface, almost erasing evidence of any rain! We even got a bit more this past Sunday night and early Monday morning, about 0.1 inches, enough to at least dampen the surface.
Putting this rain into perspective, when we run our irrigation systems, sprinklers or drip tape, we often run it for several hours attempting to add about an inch of water. How far down that water will travel is a factor of how damp or dry the soil is, combined with the soil composition. More clay in the soil will hold water better than a sandier soil, which drains quickly, and higher organic material in the soil also leads to higher water retention. Even after the two storms’ worth of rain, there were sprinkler lines running last week in the walnuts and pre-irrigating summer melon fields (the photo on top). We had enough rain to make the surface a muddy mess, halting anything but picking for a few days, but even with all the rain, digging down in the soil revealed that it was only damp for about the first eight inches. The roots of the walnut trees go much deeper, thus the need for additional irrigation.
We spend a lot of time thinking about water and irrigation and we know that many people have a lot of questions about it. We’re still early in the year and very likely will be talking about it again soon.
Separately, thanks to everyone who made it up for the Rustic Ramble and Capay Valley Grown for organizing. We had a great time meeting the many people who stopped by, including longtime CSA members, longtime readers of the Beet who’d never been here, and first timers who were just lured in by the beauty of the flower field.
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
