Rain Garden at UMass

photo courtesy of UMass

I have to say how happy I am that my alma mater, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has just installed its first Rain Garden. It is 150 feet long, 20 feet wide and 18 inches deep.  It is near the new (and very green) Studio Arts Building, below North Pleasant Street. The rain garden will collect run off from the street,  protecting the wetlands and Mill River on the west side of the campus from pollution and sediment.  Rain water is not clean after it has run off roads, lawns with animal feces and other trash. This dirty water can harm sensitive wetlands, and the sediment the run off carries will shorten the life of wetlands.

Students in Michael Davidsohn’s landscaping construction materials class, along with 2010 landscape architecture graduate Maxwell Cohen, worked on the project during the spring semester, using many recycled materials to keep the cost down.  Staff from Building and Grounds and the Physical Plant assisted with excavating, which shows the university’s support of this environmental endeavor. Davidsohn estimates that  the rain garden, planted with rushes, sedges and other water loving plants, can accept 3000 to 4000 gallons of water at a time.

Two other rain gardens are being planned for the Amherst campus.  Even when rain gardens are not protecting delicate wetlands, they do protect our storm sewer systems and the waterways that feed our rivers. They also keep the rainwater on site – recharging the local aquifer.

Hooray UMass!

Blog Action Day – Water Here and Where

Our Frog Pond

Our Frog Pond is beautiful. And useful. When our dilapidated barn was struck by lightning in the middle of the night, July 5, 1990, the volunteer fire department was able to pump water to help put out the fire. In fact, the previous owners had enlarged the pond which is stream and spring fed to make it a fire pond. The frogs like it, and so do the grandchildren. So do we. It’s good for swimming and catching newts. Catch and release, of course. We never manage to catch frogs.

Dug Well

We actually have a lot of water on our hill. Some of it we located the day after we moved in right after Thanksgiving 1979. The minute we arrived in Massachusetts from NYC, the temperature plummeted. The pipes in our new old farmhouse froze. We had no water. Our three daughters who were still living at home were not best pleased. The first thing Henry had to do when we woke up was go out and locate the dug well we had been told was in back of the house. It had been covered over and looked like wintry lawn. Henry dug, found it and uncovered it. We admired the well, a miracle of engineering and labor thirty feet deep with beautiful fieldstone walls. We hauled water by hand for several days until we thawed the pipes and got the drilled well in operation. A few years ago we put a concrete tile and cover to top the dug well, making access easier when we used it for irrigation by letting out sump pump down into the well. We never wanted to use water from the drilled well for irrigation. There are enough people in Heath who have had their wells go dry that we are aware of the dangers.

Pasture well

There is also a dug well out in the pasture, about 100 yards from the house. There was a gravity feed pipe that carried water from the well to the house, but it was separate from water from the drilled well that was the main water supply that we continue to use. We used that water for irrigation until it started smelling really really bad.  Henry girded his loins, took a ladder and climbed down the 15 food deep well – and brought up a couple of dead skunks  that managed to get in even though a large stone covered the well. Henry disconnected the line to the house, and we buried the skunks under the Applejack rose. Applejack thrives.

Lawn Bed Well

Ten years ago we created the two Lawn Beds and had our five toddler and infant grandsons plant gingko trees. Those boys are now 13 and 11 years old; the beds have been filled in with shrubs and perennials. One day, about four years ago Henry was helping me dig so I could put in an Alma Potschke aster. He hit a rock. He was always hitting a rock, but this rock slipped and skittered – and went SPLASH!  Upon closer inspection Henry saw that a large flat stone covered another well!  This one was smaller in diameter and only about 10 feet deep.  Again, it was lined with stone. We wondered if it was the first well, dug when the original house was built in the middle of the 19th century. I had great plans for turning it into a fountain, but it only collects ground water and the level varies radically over the course of the year. 

Drilled well

Last year when we had the drilled well in back of the house repaired and added an above ground wellhead to bring it up to code and make it legal, we took the circular cement block that had covered it (and then been covered with sod) and used that to  cover the Lawn Bed Well, that had been much more informally covered. The wellhead is not a thing of beauty, but we haven’t come up with a disguise yet. I do remember my friend Cindy Fisher of Big Bang Mosaics who built a beautiful mosaic bird bath to cover her wellhead.  Hmmmmm.

I have a lot of water on my hill. I am aware of how blessed we are, because wells do run dry, even here in Heath. Even here in Heath we sometimes have to haul water by hand. Even so, we don’t have to carry it far, or we can carry it by car from Whittemore Spring, every Heathan’s emergency water supply.

Snapshot of a Kenya snapshot

I can’t help remembering  when we visited our Peace Corps daughter Betsy on her Kenyan hill town where the women had to carry water from a spring a mile away. One of Betsy’s jobs was to repair a water storage tank at an old British colonial farm house for the villagers to use. She also supervised the laying of a gravity feed line from a spring to a new large water storage tank that she and villagers  built. We were fortunate enough to be visiting in July of 1989 when water was finally available from that tank. Great Celebration! Both tanks brought clean water much closer to the village.

 When we lived in Beijing, the capital city of China, we knew that many families had to share a single tap. The old houses had no running water. Which means no bathrooms. Which means chamber pots or a trip to the public bathroom on the corner. And this was in a modern city in 1989. We have seen how much more work it takes to get enough water for household use in the third world, but where you can at least have your own choo (outhouse).

We have hauled water ourselves, but worse than having to go to a lot of trouble to have water, is living where water is so scarce that the crops have dried up, where the desert has moved in, where people have had to leave their land and where water has to be trucked in their temporary camps.

The talk is all about Global Warming or Climate Change, but I think a more accurate description of what is happening is Climate Disruption.  There are more storms and destructive floods in some places. Too much water. And there are more long droughts in other places. Too little water. Here in Heath we talk about Climate Disruption causing a July with 23 days of heavy rains, breaking weather records, and a very dry September. Local farmers as well as local gardeners suffer. We feel the necessity of slowing and stopping the production of greenhouse gases that cause this problem. We hope our efforts, and efforts around the world, will not be too late.

To see what other over 8000 bloggers around the world have to say about Climate Change logon to the BLOG ACTION DAY site and take your pick. Three of the postings I’ve found valuable are Girl With Pen, Water Is Life and Lil Fish Studios News.

At Least It Didn’t Snow

The past week was  cold, wet and windy. Not much time out in the garden, although I did pick the last of the lettuce in the herb bed, and lots of sugar snap peas. We eat them raw.

On the cloudy, cold and windy Fourth of July we went to a neighbor’s BBQ where we huddled in the kitchen, only nipping out to the fire and hot dogs occasionally. We all know that kitchens are the best for catching up with rarely seen neighbors, relatives of neighbors, and relatives of old colleagues.  On our way home we stopped in our hostess’s newly wattle fenced garden to admire the sundial she won in the Commonweeder Giveaway.

Once home, where we had left an ailing son Chris and his partner Michelle, we built a fire in the stove and had a cup of hot tea!  It has been known to snow in Heath in July, and even August, but no snow on the Fourth.

On Sunday we had the unexpected arrival of a work crew – daughter Diane, her husband Gerry and son Ryan. Diane has amazing powers of motivation as well as organization. The men took down trees at the edge of the shed because they were destroying the metal roof. While they did that the women restacked the woodpile so that the oldest wood would finally be burned.  My husband, the Major, and I decided the next priority was a birch tree in the field that had been felled by the December ice storm.

Ryan and the Major

Ryan and the Major got the tractor going. You can’t see the wagon in this photo.

Chris and Gerry were already hard at work.

Diane and Michelle had to move all the removed limbs out of the way. We were all celebrating the one year anniversary of Diane’s recovery from surgery. Last June she donated a kidney to her ailing step-mother, but is now back to her old energies and activities. Her stepmother has had a slow but good recovery.

The men brought the wood back to the house, and the women stacked it on the new pile.

A job well done. A day well spent.  Thank you!

Where was I you might ask?  Well, I took some photos and even stacked a few logs, but where do you think the Granny serves?  In the kitchen.  This was a hungry crew and deserved a hearty meal.

All Innocence

After yesterday’s gray and stormy skies, this morning the view is of innocent blue and gentle cloud – could the prediction for another storm (!) tomorrow possibly be true? In any event, I’m making a break for it today.

For other fabulous sky views check out Skywatch Friday.

Better Than Ice

Yesterday ice fell out of the sky most of the day. Today it was supposed to be quite nice with just a snow flurry or two. The word flurry suggests light and brief. I don’t think this qualifies. I have been housebound (not unhappily) for days, but I do hope to make it out into the greater world tomorrow.