Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Learned this the other day in one of my Hort. classes….very disturbing to a certain extent. My little house is a 748 sq ft bungalow with a 2 car garage about the same size. When I got done with this equation, my total water shed for 1 in. of rain was 932 gallons, times that by my areas total rain fall and we got roughly 26,000 gallons for the whole year. How does your home/workplace fair? Plug in your numbers below and you’ll have a jaw dropper just like I did.
Okay,
First of all calculate the square feet of all hard surfaces (roof, driveway, patios, decks, etc)
Once you have that plug it in the following equation to find out what your watershed is per 1″ of rainfall.
_______(total sq feet) x 0.083(1″ of rain) = _______ cu. feet x 7.4 gallons/cubic feet
= __________total gallons of runoff/watershed that your home is producing.
If you wish to get the years total, go to your cities website and they should have the average rainfall in the “tourist” section.
Mulitply that by the total above and you get the year’s amount of wasted water.
(142 votes, average: 3.06 out of 5)
Irregular Times
New Button Designs
68 queries. 0.827 seconds
Top Article Last Week
March 9th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
8400 gallons of water (no garage, driveway or patio, 3 floor duplex).
But what does this mean for the locality? I’m not an environmental scientist so I wouldn’t know for sure. I think if I lived in Arizona this would be very important, because the dry ground doesn’t absorb much to begin with and it doesn’t rain very much at all. If I lived in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, what’s a little wasted water to such a deluged place?
So how do I interpret this number?
March 9th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Whoops. I plugged in DAYS of rainfall, not ANNUAL INCHES of rainfall. Plus, I didn’t multiply by 7.4. Big differences there that kind of cancel each other out. 14,790 gallons is really the number for me.
Check out rainfall here for some of the larger American metro areas.
March 9th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
That water is going down your into your sewer system and out into the water ways. For those of you that think all water is treated before it gets to the rivers and lakes think again. Where do your water go when it leaves your roof/driveway/patio? If you have tilled gardens then great it will go there otherwise it runs right off your lawn into the street and down into the sewer system and out into the rivers/streams and lakes, taking with it everything in its path. Lawn fertilizer, oil/antifreeze from cars, dog poop, garbage. It takes only one quart of oil to damage 250,000 gallons of fresh water, I’ve got that sitting on my driveway. If you fertilize with a high phosphorous lawn fertilizer and fertilize more than the lawn can take in, the rest is wash out with each rain and that is why there are lakes and pounds over run with algea.
Its not so much that waste of water, its what you could do with it before it gets to the lakes and streams. Landscape, rainbarrels instead of irrigation, raingardens etc.
March 10th, 2007 at 8:53 am
I get that general point, but I’m still not sure what the number tells me. To start with, some of that water will not go straight into the waterways, as your “landscaping” point brings out. Some will go into flower beds or a lawn, and more will go into flower beds that are dry, but less if the flower beds are parched dry, and more if the flower beds are in the right position, and so on and so forth. Other aspects of what you’re talking about aren’t based on water, but what you put on your lawn or driveway or whatever.
Also, what does the number tell me to do, to change? If I’m living in a house, I can’t really do much to reduce the number besides move or knock down the house. It seems that regardless of what your number is, you should do whatever you can to reduce the amount of drainage that does come off.
March 10th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
I live in an area that was once at the bottom of a large lake, and the soil is a combination of sandy and clay, the clay mostly being about 3 feet down. To capture water from the downspout and prevent it from forming a river across my front sidewalk where it is annoying to walk on, especially when it freezes, last fall I constructed a “dry sink”, something I once ran across in an old gardening book.
The dry sink is a hole filled with stones that serves to store water that runs off too quickly to soak in. It needs to be about a foot across at the top and three feet deep. If you have a clay layer at the bottom, this will form a barrier to water soaking in, and you need to dig past the clay layer to a sand layer or to where the soil drains. If you have a rockpile where you throw all the stones you find when you are gardening, this is a good place to get rid of the rock pile. You don`t want to use old concrete chunks as fill because they are alkaline and the lime will leach into the soil. Alkali makes lawns and some other plants happy, but not most flowers or shade plants. I have been eyeing some of the light-weight, porous-looking stones that have been thrown clear of a nearby railroad grade, but I don`t suppose it`s okay to remove railroad property. The top six inches or so of the dry sink can be filled with topsoil and will disguise what is underground.
Most dry sinks I have constructed for drainage problems on other properties have simply soaked up the standing water and returned it quietly to the water table, but when I tested out my latest drysink with the garden hose, I got a very satisfying whirlpool action like in a bathtub.
You can also get your soil to hold more moisture by composting, but this can take many seasons and binds up nitrogen in the soil for a couple years until the organic material is completely decomposed–not good for tomatoes–although you can offset this with nitrogen rich fertilizer. A faster way that also improves soil tilth (makes the soil softer so the roots can get through) is to get a big bale of dry peat moss and work it into the soil. Earthworms will also do this job for you.
On a larger scale, the university in a town I visit occasionally has incorporated parking lots into its drainage plan for the campus. The town is extremely flat and has a creek running through the middle, but because of the flatness, the runoff has nowhere to go and merely floods the creek. The campus parking lots are constructed to store an inch of standing water in case of a downpour.
BTW, we never heard how the basement worm farm is working out.
March 10th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Here’s what the numbers help you to do. If you wish to construct a dry sink/rain garden then the their areas should be 10% of the total area of your hard surfaces or should be able to hold 10% of your water shed during a 1″ rain fall.
Another interesting thing is most lawns are planted with some type of kentucky blue grass. Kentucky blue has a root system of only 4″ which means it can only take in about a half hour soaking and everything after that is runoff (even if you live in sand) because the ground is below is compacted and not aerated by roots. If you were to plant grasses like yarrow, fescue or sweet grass which have root systems 8 to 18″ your soil is more deeply aerated and is able to take in and keep more water and not waste it to run off.
If you wish to learn more things about this go to your local watershed district or extension website or see my states website www.extension.umn.edu
March 10th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
The extension service is excellent, but has been gutted by budget cuts over the years. When I was a kid and wanted to take my tomato with a worm in to find out what to do about it, there was a county agent in every county. Now retiring agents are no longer replaced and one agent may have to cover several counties. In the city it’s worse, gardeners have to rely on the people who sell chemicals for information, and even those places have been closing. My last vegetable plant was purchased at WalMart.
In all fairness, I have heard the lake pollution is caused by runoff from agricultural land, not your ordinary lawns and gardens. Some of my cousins have farmed fairly recently and they say you can’t farm these days without hundreds of dollars of chemicals to get enough yield out of every acre to break even.
What’s a rain garden?
March 10th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
the pollution is not from the small farmer or small orchards/nurserys its from industrial agriculture. And what the hell are you buying from Walmart!!! go to your local farmers market you Alan!!!
The extension office websites are now run by the universities or the land grant universities or the agriculture universities.
Your cousins took the easy way out, didn’t use disease resistant varieties or have an Integrated Pest Management Plan in place before they took up or the person they worked for took up farming. Some chemicals may be necessary but can be environmental safe and human safe for instance insecticidal soaps and using beneficial insects.
The only reason for using chemicals is because there is no proper prep work done at planting or at harvest. In other words no money spent on labor - only chemicals, land, and seed.
Anyway, off my rant before i blow a green gasket.
here are some websites for explaining a raingarden, its just a good way to hold and filter run off, many parking lots and big chain stores are now putting these in.
http://www.millcreekwatershed.org/rain_garden.html
http://www.extension.umn.edu/info-u/environment/BD462.html
March 10th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Laurie, thanks for the additional info. That was very helpful.
March 11th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Extension service was orginally conceived as a partnership between government and university as a way to get the knowledge of the universities to the public. The federal government still picks up part of the tab, but there is now some relationship with industry as well, as the universities do some research for agri-business corporations.
I’ve never lived with farming close up, but the cousins are third generation farmers, and have some ag degrees between them too. They live further west, where farmland 10 years ago was $300 an acre, not $3000, the soil is poor and rainfall marginal. When I lived out there, a lot of farmers worked at the state hospital at night, they really needed the $1.87/hour. Since then things have gone downhill for the farmer, few can afford to live on the farm anymore. I think the days of the family farm are gone.
Nice sketches of rain garden, but they don’t talk about species, I suppose it depends on your region. I grow some huge snails in the fifteen foot run between my downspout and the dry sink, and a few hostas to feed them!
March 11th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
I am one of those farming families, ours was bought by a couple that made it into a treefarm and then an ag business took over 3 of the farms 700 acres and that as they say was that.
Anyway, glad you guys liked the info and hope you can pass it on. I just thought is was interesting for anyone.
March 13th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Here’s a good how to pdf and it lists the plants, dimensions etc. Its from WI so most of the plants are hardy.
http://clean-water.uwex.edu/pubs/pdf/home.rgmanual.pdf
March 13th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
That was excellent. If someone wanted to save money, in this part of the country there are usually a lot of ordinary day lilies around that people throw out, or are willing to dig up and divide.
The writeup shows laying out the garden with a string, but I use the actual plants themselves in their pots. Locate the largest ones first, like building a skeleton, then fill in the smaller ones. It’s easier to change your mind before digging the holes.
The edge of the border should be laid out with your lawnmower. Think about it. Do want to spend your summer backing up and going around curves that are too tight for your mower’s wheels? So just before deciding on the final line of the border take out the lawnmower you will be using and go around the new garden. The wheels should leave some faint impressions in the grass that can guide your shovel.
March 13th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Good idea on the lawn mower thing Alan, I am sure my husband wishes I would have done that first :).
Also, every 2 or three years I let everyone know I am digging up my phlox, peonies, hosta, daisies, and daylilies, to thin and divide - we usually end up having a plant trading party.