drought vs plain little fish

Brother James said, "I don't know. We might not not even have a garden this year." That's unthinkable and there he is thinking it. I had instant pity, and deep pity too, for his wife, new to the country, straight to California, a rather big dream come true and unfold before her in series of amazements and BAM no garden. Oh no. The humanity.

"How about hydroponic tomatoes like your Aerogarden except 5 gallon buckets that are tiered."

"How does the water flow to the buckets?"

"Gravity."

I see on right-leaning blogs comments to articles addressing Jerry Brown and California and earlier chances they had back then in the 70's when population was less that go along the lines of, "All this for minnow," or, "Meanwhile hundreds of billions of gallons of water flushed into the Pacific to protect the Delta Smelt," and the comments rise to the top there in comments and separated out for admiration for their top commenting summation.

Ed Driscoll, VDH: How Jerry Brown Engineered California's Drought

That's a lot of water when people are hurting for water.

But why? Why would the state do this to save the fish? What is it about these fish? What are they anyway? And why all the fuss about concentrations of people and farms and industry?

Turns out to be Silvery Minnows in one area of controversy and Delta Smelt in another. The minnows are not baby fish, that is just their name because they are small like bait fish, they are adult fish that are small but not so small as neon tetras. Both are plain. If you drew a simple cartoon fish with the basics, these would be it. One is a little more like a pencil than the other. They're both the size of a finger.

It is the Delta Smelt that looks more like an eel.
The Silvery Minnow looks like a cartoon fish.

I thought, "This is a challenge for aquarium hobbyists. Save the fish!"

No challenge is too great for aquarium hobbyists, any river or lake situation can be replicated with technical precision and artistic éclat. The fish are not much to look at, but there is cache in being environmentally-minded, "oh those are endangered species," the sacrifices we make and all that, but if they would shoal together in river-like conditions, or collect among native river plants in or out out of a current, they might be fun to observe. I notice fish do that when frightened, clump together like that, so scare them a little. Reading along through various stories about these endangered species and water disputes, one of the articles mentioned that California is already doing all this aquarium breeding with some 50,000 or some fish in re-establishment programs statewide. It is not a matter of the number of fish being low.

Maybe it was 500,000. It was a lot of little fish.

It is a matter of their entire environment threatened. The fish are the canaries in the coal mine so to speak, indicating the entire environment is out of whack be the cause population stress, or farming or industry, things are seriously wrong and a million caged canaries or aquarium fish will not fix that imbalance.

And James you did move there to be part of all that is happening in California, so suck it, your wife knew worse hardships than relief from gardening, so let's look at some schemes for hydroponic tomatoes. This could be fun.

Two hundred eighty pounds of tomatoes! Shut up! I went back and forth from Tony's and home all summer long filling my backpack with tomatoes and peaches, passing them around, and I didn't come close to two hundred eighty pounds. That is a ringing success. He sounded so sad, and yet happy too for the success then back to sad for it ending this way with blight then back to happy to have done it, and pleased to try again and admitting the whole thing is fun. And that is the whole point because you buy heirloom tomatoes all season long for half the expense, depending on crop and setup, and none of the trouble.

I couldn't find the earlier video I saw of the guy with the 5 gallon buckets. Built as stadium bleachers the water is pumped to the top, maybe distributed up there, each bucket fills by charged water pumped directly over the roots of the top tier plants. It drains over them into the bucket. The bucket fills to a point then drains to the plant in the next bucket down directly over its roots, filling its bucket to a point. Water remains in the bottom of the buckets so the whole inside of the bucket stays fogged and the roots hanging in there always wet and always refreshed and recharged.  All tiers are watered this way and and pump shuts off for awhile and starts up again in preprogramed sequence.

Now on YouTube all the videos are people showing off their gigantic hydroponic tomatoes. Each year new videos are added and now they only mention the type of their system. The rest is all tomato parade and that is not helpful. Except this guy. I almost made a cartoon of him in Rube Goldberg style.

He's bombed.

And then the camera turns back on the fish in their fiberglass storage containers to the fish that do not see the light of day and you realize the fish spend their whole lives in there like a prison. And my tank is a prison too but at least my tank has a chance of faking them out.