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.
[Read more…]
