How to Water The Garden

At this very moment, somewhere on our vast planet, it’s raining. But at the MOTHER EARTH NEWS EcoVillage garden, we’re in the middle of a typical summer dry spell . . . so I’ve been busy soaking the bases of our tomato plants with a watering wand.

Most of us — with the twist of a spigot — can turn a garden hose into an umbilical cord linking us to vast (yet not inexhaustible) underground rivers. And since many of us don’t need to worry about the availability of water, being blessed with adequate supplies, we can often afford, instead, to fret about when to water . . . how much moisture to put down . . . what implements and techniques are most appropriate to use . . . and how to conserve as much water as possible while still nurturing the crops.

These are the concerns we’ll address in this article. But first, let’s review some fundamentals about . . .

Soil and Water

Water provides more than just liquid to a plant; it’s also the medium that enables nutrients and minerals to enter the roots. (Roots don’t digest dirt — they’re not “woody earthworms” — but instead obtain their nutrients only in solution.) What’s more, through the process of photosynthesis, some of water’s hydrogen is split off to become a constituent of the carbohydrate compounds that make up most of the body tissue of growing plants.

Interestingly, water also enables plant roots to obtain nutrients that are beyond their physical reach. At varying depths below our feet lies the water table. Above that is soil containing minute, air-filled vestibules. When enough moisture surrounds each soil particle to create a continuous film from roots to water table, plants can, by capillary action, draw water and thus food from places far beneath their roots. (When this happens, the soil is said to have reached field capacity.)

If, on hot summer days, the crops use more water than is replaced, dry air spaces are created within the soil, and the bridge to the water table is broken. Conversely, if a real downpour hits and the air spaces become flooded to the point of excluding oxygen altogether, plants can literally drown — because roots must have air available, as well as water.

The foundations of the first true American microhouse—and of the philosophy that changed society’s attitude toward personal freedom and man’s relationship with Nature—were laid “near the end of March, 1845,” when Henry David Thoreau, a Harvard dropout from Concord, Massachusetts, borrowed an ax, walked a mile and a half to Walden Pond, and began to build a ten-by-fifteen-foot one-room cabin of hand-hewn logs and recycled shanty boards fastened with salvaged nails and wooden pegs. In an era when a laborer earned a dollar a day, his total cash outlay for the house came to $28.12. He lived there for more than two years and from the experience wrote a book called Walden, which changed my life and the lives of many others. It can change yours as well.

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In the balance of this article, we’ll suggest how you can live like Thoreau and create your own Walden by designing and building your own rustic microhouse. Perhaps you’ll just want to dream about doing so.  Be sure to check out the image gallery along the way to see some helpful illustrations.

Even in the backyard of a town or suburban home, a microhouse exempt from building codes can be built as a moveable tool shed. Arrange the front to face the garden or perhaps a little fishpond; screen its open sides with fast-growing shrubs and vines. Fitted with a portable chemical toilet behind a folding screen in one comer, water from a hose, and electricity from a long outdoor extension cord plugged in at the house, it can provide a rustic backyard retreat for anyone who needs some private quiet time in a natural setting.

In a more rural locale, where city zoning rules and building codes won’t interfere, a more firmly rooted version with a detached privy and a grey water drywell to dispose of cooking and wash water can serve as a place of their own for grandmother or an adult child who has come to live with you. Farther afield still, it can serve as a low-cost, low-impact second home in the woods or mountains or on a lake. It can be a place to camp while you build your full-size log cabin; then you can convert the microhouse into an in-law’s or older teenager’s apartment, a small barn, stable, or hen house.

It can be the ultimate retreat on a slow-moving Southern catfish and craw-dad creek to host a sun-warmed retirement that will remain affordable no matter what might happen to Social Security or the Dow Jones average.

Choosing a Good Location for a Microhouse

Where to build? Some place wild and natural to be sure—or as wild and natural as you can manage. Economies aside, the greatest environmental advantage of a hand-built microhouse over conventional home construction is that a diesel bulldozer isn’t needed to dig cellars and utility lines, to grade the land flat, and to make noise and belch smoke. Like Thoreau, you can haul or cart your house, plank by plank, as far into the back-beyond as your energy permits and erect it on a foundation of local stones, so the structure disturbs little of its natural surroundings. A hand-built microhouse rests lightly on the earth, and you can site one in places where limited access, rugged topography, environmental ethics, or law prohibits conventional construction.

National median home prices will improve for the balance of the year and end with a slight annual decline before bottoming out by 2013, but homeownership will continue to drop over the next five years, according to a quarterly survey of housing economists and experts released today.

A majority (56 percent) of experts also believe that in five years the U.S. homeownership rate will fall below 65.4 percent, the rate recorded in the first quarter of 2012. One in five believe the homeownership rate will be at or below 63 percent, testing or breaking the 62.9 percent rate established in 1965, the lowest on record, according to the June 2012 Zillow Home Price Expectations Survey, compiled from 114 responses by a diverse group of economists, real estate experts and investment and market strategists.

The most optimistic quartile of panelists predict a 1 percent increase in 2012, on average, while the most pessimistic predict an average decline of 2 percent. The June survey results also indicate that most of the panelists expect home prices to increase for the remainder of this year after falling 2 percent in the first quarter, ending in a 0.4 percent decline for the entire year, and will increase thereafter,

“It’s good to start to see some convergence of expectations among economists, as it lends further support to the claim that a bottom is real,” said Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries. “However, the fact that more than half of respondents believe that the homeownership rate will fall lower should be a sobering reminder that significant challenges remain ahead for the housing market, from negative equity to millions of foreclosed homeowners who now have impaired credit, making a return to homeownership harder than it would be otherwise.”

While the stronger signals of an imminent market bottom and turn are encouraging, the expected pace of housing recovery over the coming three years is significantly weaker now than it was two years ago. The survey is based on the projected path of the S&P/Case-Shiller® U.S. National Home Price Index during the coming five years.

“In June 2010, the average cumulative appreciation in U.S. home prices expected by our panel was 10.3 percent for the years 2012 through 2014. Now, two years later, the average prediction among our experts for the same period is just 3.5 percent,” said Terry Loebs, founder of Pulsenomics, which conducts the survey. “This translates into $1.25 trillion less housing wealth than expected nationally over the coming three years.”

Widespread shortages in housing inventories, especially in states that have experienced large price declines since 2006, are reducing the time homes for sale are spending on market, especially move-in ready foreclosures (REO) .

REOs that need no major repairs or renovations to be resold or occupied are increasingly being snapped up, with an average time on market of just 10.6 weeks in May, the lowest of any property category, according to the latest results of the monthly Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey.

Inventory shortages are caused by homeowners holding their homes off the market while hoping for a rebound in prices, and by homeowners that are underwater on their mortgage and effectively locked in place. For the distressed property categories, a shortage of attractive inventory is caused by slow processing at mortgage servicers.

Average prices for home purchases were mixed from April to May, shown in transactions reported by HousingPulse survey respondents. The average price for non-distressed properties rose 1.7 percent from April to May, while the average price for short sales slipped 0.7 percent. For damaged REO the average price increased 1.8 percent and for move-in ready REO the average price fell 1.5 percent.

“Inventory in Orange County CA is super low. During the top of the housing scare, the city that my office is located in had almost a 6 month supply of unsold homes. Currently it is down to just 45 days!” reported a real estate agent in California. “Inventory in the Santa Clarita Valley (35 miles north of LA) is very low. We have less than 500 listings, which is well below the 1,500-1,800 properties we average,” added another agent in the state.

One factor continuing to balance inventory shortages is the high share of distressed properties, especially short sales. The total share of distressed properties in the housing market in May, as represented by the HousingPulse Distressed Property Index (DPI), was 46.1 percent, using a three-month moving average. This was the 27th month in a row that the DPI has been above 40 percent.

Appraisals are another factor keeping a lid on prices. “Appraisals that are less than agreed-to contract sale price are inhibiting natural valid appreciation,” complained an agent in Florida. “Appraisal issues are holding back some sales and price increases although many buyers seem willing to pay a cash difference to close on properties that do not appraise [high enough],” observed another agent in Florida.

The Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey involves approximately 2,500 real estate agents nationwide each month and provides up-to-date intelligence on home sales and mortgage usage patterns.

Record-low inventory levels are breathing new life into homes that were withdrawn from the market but now are finding buyers in markets across the country.

Relisted properties make up a large part of her business, reported Denver Realtor Lydia Lin of One Realty at the National Association of Real Estate Editors conference last week. Reports around the country indicate that the inventory drought is reducing the number of expired listings and encouraging owners who took their homes off the market to relist them for sale.

On the national level, the inventory of single family homes, condominiums, townhouses and co-ops for-sale was 20.07 percent lower last month than it was in May 2011 and declined in all but two of the 146 markets covered by Realtor.com. Since the beginning of the year, the total size of the inventory has averaged about 1.8 to 1.9 million units, the lowest levels observed since Realtor.com began collecting these data in January 2007.

Though no one keeps national data on expired listings and relistings on a national level, market reports from brokers and MLSs around the nation confirm that the environment has improved this year for relisted properties that failed to sell the first time around.

Many agents take a listing for 90 days, when the listing expires. Most MLSs require that expired listings stay off the market for at least 90 days to discourage the practice of relisting slow selling properties to “freshen” them and hide their actual accumulated days on market from buyers. However, in today’s market, fewer properties are expiring and many of those than do are finding buyers when they come back on market. After a home is on the market for 60 to 90 days, it is not unusual for it to sell within five days after coming back on the market as a new listing.

Tallahassee Realtor Joe Manausa calls unsold, expired listings the “forgotten” real estate inventory because the vast majority, as many as 80 percent, will return to the market when flaws that kept them from selling are corrected or the market improves.

“It is the growing group of homeowners who have given up hope of selling their home, but they still want to move. Many of the homes that failed to sell simply re-entered the MLS after failing (sometimes more than once) and eventually sold, but you might be surprised at the number of failures that still remain in the forgotten real estate inventory,” he wrote in the Active Rain site.

The Forgotten Inventory appears to be on the decline in many areas. In Atlanta, where listings are down 33 percent on the year, one broker offered 25 IPads last spring to agents who brought expired listings from competitors. “Think about this… every single listing is now TWICE as prominent and important as it would have been back in the day of 100,000 available listings. Each listing today is worth 2 listings two years ago,” said Metro Broker’s Ann Bone.

In Williamsburg, VA expired listings are down 21 percent from a year ago . In Oakland, they were down 34 percent in May from 2011. In the South Bay area, expired listings peaked at the end of the year. In Austin, one of the hottest markets in the country, the ratio of sold to not sold homes on the MLS was 26 percent in the month of March. Even in good, solid seller’s market about one-third of homes that fail to sell for various reasons.