Skip to main content

Moving Water, Having Fun

Here's what happens when we were testing with the hose to add water to the garden basin. Looks like it just rained, but not on day this taken, April 4. This was last week, and recent cold weather and rain have added to the lower rain garden basin, to be shown next.

My "raingarden" is not actually the same as what may be pictured in recent articles about this concept. What I have is more of a drainage system with a swale at the upper side, pictured here, and another swale at the lower level, with drainage channels running in between.

Basically all this is more like the playing with sand and water at the beach that I did as a kid. We'd work on rerouting the stream channel that ran into Puget Sound near our house, using beach rocks, logs, and the sand. Now its dirtier, and there's an actual purpose to it other than just having fun. But when I'm out there and the rain is pouring down and I'm poking at the little blockages in the drainage patterns, removing sticks and leaves with the bamboo garden stake I just grabbed, not bothering to change shoes after getting home from some meeting or other, well, what else but fun?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Convergence of Plastic Bigger than Texas

This is text from places cited - how many of the plastic bags I throw away end up here? How can there be any more debate about paper or plastic or recyclable? Great Pacific Garbage Patch In the broad expanse of the northern Pacific Ocean, there exists the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slowly moving, clockwise spiral of currents created by a high-pressure system of air currents. The area is an oceanic desert, filled with tiny phytoplankton but few big fish or mammals. The area is filled with something besides plankton: trash, millions of pounds of it, most of it plastic. It's the largest landfill in the world, and it floats in the middle of the ocean. The gyre has actually given birth to two large masses of ever-accumulating trash, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches, sometimes collectively called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California; scientists estimate its size as two times bigger than Texas. Th...

Spring in January 2010

Been so warm outside these days, really feels like spring. Grass is starting to grow, daffodils are up a few inches or more in places, primroses blooming and for sale at all the groceries, weeds growing, and we hear they are worried about getting enough snow for the Olympics next month up the road in Vancouver, B.C. And no, this warm winter in the Puget Sound Convergence Zone has nothing to do with Global Warming, or as we should call it, Global Climate Change. What I don't understand at all is why so many people who have learned to read and write and supposedly understand what they read have decided not to use their abilities to discern what scientists keep telling us. The glaciers are melting, that's a fact. But don't take my word for it, or the National Geographic's word for it. Go read for yourself. Ok, so now we just call it Global Change. Not just climate, or maybe not even climate, and certainly nothing to do with the weather. Changes in the global envir...