I’m standing at the base of Buck Gully. Little Corona del Mar State Beach and the Pacific Ocean is to my right, Crystal Cove State Park is a few steps straight ahead. A steady stream of water is flowing at my feet.

 

I could be standing and looking at similar streams at dozens of other locations. Places like the base of Muddy Canyon, Los Trancos Canyon, Pelican Point Creek or Big Canyon, or the Costa Mesa, Delhi or Wintersburg Channels.

 

But standing here at Buck Gully in Corona del Mar the “stream” is flowing strong, about 350 gallons every minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week – all year, year after year. But it hasn’t rained in over two weeks. This isn’t rainwater.

 

Three miles way, at 6:30 the next morning I’m driving slowly through the streets of a Newport Beach community. It is still dark outside; the sky is just beginning to brighten. The neighborhood is quiet and peaceful, the gardens beautiful; a typical morning in paradise.

 

The weather has been cool the past few days. Today, the high temperature will top out at 62 degrees. As I move slowly down the streets with the windows down, the morning air is crisp. The quiet is interrupted every now and then by the sound of sprinkler heads popping up, followed by brief “gurgles” and then “sputters”, as water rushes out of the pipes. The lawns and landscapes are receiving their scheduled dose of water.

 

Many, if not most, of these lawns and gardens were recently fertilized with Miracle Gro or Scott’s or Bandini, or something similar. Snails and slugs are beginning to rise for their spring chew, so baits are now in place to stop them in their tracks. Weeds are unnecessary in a garden, so a little Roundup here and there or maybe some weed-and-feed on the lawn keeps these undesirables at bay.

 

Sipping my Starbucks keeps me warm. Up ahead, a row of sprinklers pop up. Within a minute or two the sidewalks are wet and the gutters are flowing. Gravity draws the water down the street a few yards where it drops into a hole in the curb and disappears from sight. I stop the car and wait. Four or five minutes later the sprinklers drop back down and out of sight, where they will wait for their next command, perhaps tomorrow morning at precisely the same time. A few lights are now on inside some of the homes, but the streets are still deserted and motionless – except for the little streams of water that gravity is pulling along.

 

Down at Little Corona Beach the stream at Buck Gully is running a little bit stronger.

 

 

As gardeners, none of us intends to waste irrigation water or to feed our oceans with nitrates or phosphates or anything else. We use fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, snail baits and other products to keep our lawns and shrubs healthy. For many of us, our gardeners use these products on our behalf; we may not even know what, when or how they are used. Nonetheless, pesticides are applied in our gardens, not in Upper Newport Bay or Crystal Cove State Park.

 

Unfortunately, oceans and bays are where many of these products end up, carried by runoff water from our landscapes. It’s a very serious issue. As coastal gardeners it is our responsibility. It’s time for us to do the right thing.

 

Early in the morning, a simple electric controller opens a valve. Water rushes through plastic underground pipes, sprays out of little nozzles and onto our plants. But, a portion of that early morning water runs across our landscapes, over our curbs and eventually into our ocean, carrying with it a daily load of fertilizers, pesticides, bacteria, pet feces, heavy metals and other pollutants.

 

The Newport Coast development alone releases an estimated 24 million gallons of contaminated runoff into our protected marine habitats each month.

 

It’s a very serious issue. As coastal gardeners it is our responsibility to take action. It’s time for us to do the right thing.

 

There are some easy steps that we can take to reduce our impact on the coastal environment. A few of them are obvious . . . irrigation timing, station cycling, simple changes to sprinkler patterns, proper use of fertilizers, mulching, using ocean-friendly products and cleaning up pet feces. But there may be some less familiar hi-tech solutions that we can also incorporate . . . like Smart irrigation timers and super efficient sprinkler heads. In next Friday’s column I’ll suggest a few easy steps that we can all take to curb landscape runoff and coastal pollution.

 

By next week, another 60,000 gallons of landscape water and pollutants will have gone into the ocean - from the “stream” at Buck Gully.

 

 

Ron Vanderhoff is the Nursery Manager at Roger’s Gardens, Corona del Mar