Nopal, blossoming potato plants, and salt deposits in the soil.
Our water is highly saline - and it's a predicament. We cannot get any plants established without irrigation, and the mesquites in particular are critical for bringing back soil fertility. Even though all of the water we irrigate with goes through a filter, the TDS is still around 1100 from the hose - that's brackish. Our drinking water is filtered again through a 14-stage filter with a reverse osmosis stage, and so is pure, but such a filter big enough to handle the whole property is an enormous expense. There are manual ways to desalinate water, and we are going to try some methods, but it is unlikely that that will meet our needs for the immediate future.
So.. why? Why should we bother? Should humans even live in such an environment? Shouldn't we give up and move on?
Well, with something like 150,000 hectares of land becoming desert each year, it feels important to find ways to solve these problems. We can run from them, but they will find us.
One solution I'm going to try is to plant saltbrush (which is native and abundant on our property, though most has shed its green to manage through drought) near everything we're irrigating. Mulching with straw also helps, as the straw ends up with the salt, not the soil, though I imagine the salt makes its way to the soil eventually as the straw (very, very) slowly breaks down into the basin - though there are ways we could mitigate this (feeding the straw to donkeys is one potential future solution). Saltbrush takes in the salt, capturing it in its leaves, according to one source. Research on non-charismatic desert species is minimal, and so I have yet to find any specific information on what happens next. However, building on the source I found that mentions saltbrush as being high value forage, and knowing that most livestock need supplemental salt, I'm interested in testing the hypothesis that if we plant saltbrush in strategic locations, and then periodically harvest and feed it to livestock, the salt will then be utilized by the animal and not be directly put back into the soil. Obviously salt will be freely available, still, to all future livestock, but my hypothesis is that they would need less supplemental salt if they were ingesting it in their forage/feed.
It makes me curious about ecological roles: salt-loving native plants are endemic (at least, as far as I know now) to regions where bighorn sheep and mule deer once roamed: species which would, in theory, also need salt in their diet. While the groundwater the plants were accessing with deep taproots would have been theoretically less saline before the water table was disrupted by human use, concentrating the mineral content, it is likely it has always had some salt content, the water in our aquifers being trapped water from an ancient sea. Could the ecosystem be protecting soil structure through symbiosis with salt-loving plants and herbivores who otherwise have few native sources of salt in their diet?
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