PISCES Mini-Lesson, Day 3: Water!
Videos #1 and 2: When it rains, it pours! A rainy day at PISCES.
Photo #3: Rain water between planting beds after a large rain. Soon the water will be absorbed by the soil.
Water's great, but also rather strange. We need it to live, but too much of it will kill you. It covers 71 percent of the world but we can only use one percent of it to drink, water our lawns, and grow crops. It can dissolve everything from salts to clays to gases to allow metabolism and respiration to occur. Its solid form is less dense than its liquid form, which is why ice floats in a glass of water. Without this weird chemical quirk, lakes and rivers would likely freeze solid and life on earth as we know it would be impossible.
As we are unable to irrigate our crops, we at PISCES are reliant on rainfall to water our crops. If the rain doesn't come soon or often enough, there will be a drought and our crops will fail. Conversely, if there's too much rain, our fields will flood and many of our plants would likely die. So of course we have a bit of a love-hate relationship with water, because there's either too much or too little of it! At PISCES however, we use a range of techniques to retain and manage water. This allows us to trap the rain when it is scarce and prevents flooding when there is excessive rain. More on all of this later!