Oasisforming in the upper Coachella Valley is my
retirement project.
I've got 10 acres of habitat about 10 minutes east of Desert Hot Springs over the
hot water aquifer zone at about 1080-1100'. The parcel has power and water utilities on site and is legally accessible 1300' from a paved road. There are several neighbors within a few hundred feet.
My first steps are to get the parcel certified as compliant by Riverside County, a process underway, to
fence it in, drill the well, and begin to clear some creosote, plant nitrogen fixing cover crops and date palms to start the grove with well irrigation. The margins of the property will be planted with Blue Palo Verde and both Screwbean and
Honey mesquite, also well irrigated.
The soil type is Carsitas which is sand and gravel. So I'll need to do work to build up,
compost and incorporate biomass. I'm not sure if I can do the vegetable garden in the gravely sand soil, at least not at first, might have to build raised beds. And keeping critters,
rabbits and squirrels, at bay will be a challenge.
My plan is to remove creosote is to hack the limbs down with a chainsaw, use a hand torch to scorch the crown, and then to cover the crown with black plastic to deny the crown sunlight. I'd like to leave the
root system in the soil.
As the dates begin to take and grow, then I'll plant the fruit forest in the protection of the grove. Well irrigation expands the range of possibility. In order to irrigate using CVWD water, you've got to pay $11K per acre and then pay their high water rates.
I'll be getting a chipper shredder and plowing all organic matter back into the system as compost. The Flying Disc ranch in Thermal shows how this can be done:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4mkqPUZs38
Riverside County planning are not pushovers. The range of the possible is quite constrained as far as what can be built and how. I see daylight, though, on building a house. I am looking for crescent or C shaped houses so that we can point it to the west and have a space in the lee of the wind to grow bananas and other wind-weary tropicals. The last phase is taking advantage of the zoning for guest ranches to set up a
hot water hospitality business.
Another rub with this parcel is that there is a desert wash running through that is a FEMA "A" flood zone. County flood control has been quite helpful in providing exhibits for a FEMA application to constrain the flood risk into the wash so that any
mortgage financed building on the majority of the parcel does not require flood insurance. Negotiating that federal bureaucracy has certainly been an eye opener.
But the watercourse is a feature not a bug, the intent is to preserve as much of the landscape as habitat as possible. There are burrowing owls adjacent to the
land and we'll need to take care to ensure that we don't remove any creosote bushes that
shelter desert tortoises.
