-
Creekin’
-
Leek Blossom
After several inches of rain dropped on the garden, I took the camera out to see the changes. The leek blossoms were splitting open, and this one in particular looked like a beaked bird and had lovely light-filtering water droplets on top.
-
Turtle Hole Eno River
We spend far too many Saturdays around here without a plan. The morning fades into noon and the day goes by without our really sucking the marrow out of it. We sometimes lament that we can’t afford fancy travel or fun toys like motor boats and waltz back to life on Monday with ridiculous sunglasses and sandal tans and windblown hair. We let things like money, the ages of our boys, and that mid-morning punch of drowsiness relegate us to the sofa or playroom. This past Saturday, we took a family adventure that blew me away. As in Sunday morning I was aching all over, and I was made aware…
-
White Deer Park Rainwater Cisterns
After several posts on my home water cistern, I thought it would be fun to share what White Deer Park in Gardner is doing with rainwater. White Deer Park was built on land with its roots in agriculture, so they chose to have their cisterns resemble silos and built structures with lean-to roofs. Their picnic shelters all have cisterns to capture runoff. I’m not sure what most of them are used for, but one of these feeds into a hand pump in the natural playground and squirts out into a small constructed concrete stream that runs through the play area and under a foot bridge. The pump requires some priming,…
-
Would a rainwater cistern save you money?
Once you start down the green road, it’s pretty easy to get hyped about conservation – soil, water, building supplies, energy, savings. You would assume a rainwater cistern for watering your garden would save you money. This could be true, but depending on the size of your garden, the frequency of use and the cost of your system, it might actually take a very long time to see those savings. The Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at North Carolina State University has produced a free computer model that simulates a cistern for your garden based on historical rainfall data and and calculates how long it would take to recoup your…
-
Too Much Water in the Garden?
It is raining again. The cistern is completely full, the French tile drain is at capacity, and everything goes squish when stepped on. There is more rain the forecast for tonight and tomorrow. Our garden sits on a small plateau that seems to retain water. Two days ago I dug out a dead hibiscus to discover standing water at the bottom of the hole and a big fat spider. Currently all the paths are under water, which first blew my mind but then validated our decision to dig the paths down while building the beds up. There are still spots where the beds are too low and little seedlings are…