WEBVTT

METADATA
Video-Count: 1
Video-1: youtube.com/watch?v=LX9QYLxnqcM

NOTE
MEETING SECTIONS:

Part 1 (Video ID: LX9QYLxnqcM):
- 00:00:10: Introduction, Welcome, Logistics, and Thank You's from Greening Greenfield
- 00:02:40: Greening Greenfield's Mission, Focus on Water, and Vegetation
- 00:04:54: Examples of Greening Initiatives and List Serve Information
- 00:06:48: Introduction of Mary Westervelt and Kate Chalakus
- 00:07:14: Mary Westervelt Introduces Landscape Architect Kate Chalakus
- 00:08:59: Personal Memory of Water and Water Quality Issues
- 00:11:21: Water Quantity Problems, Flooding Events, and Causes
- 00:13:13: Impervious Surfaces, Flood Plains, and Pollution Issues
- 00:15:56: Defining Watersheds and the Impact of Impervious Surfaces
- 00:17:32: Stormwater Sleuthing: Analyzing Drainage on Your Site
- 00:19:10: Patterns, Streets, Storm Drains, and Runoff Considerations
- 00:20:34: Understanding Street Infrastructure and Potential Runoff Issues
- 00:22:09: Drainage on Your Site: Flow, Pooling, and Erosion
- 00:24:06: Analyzing House Drainage, Gutters, and Positive Drainage
- 00:26:26: Using Greenfield's Online Mapping Tool for Contour Analysis
- 00:28:37: Detailed Topography Analysis Using Contours and Water Flow
- 00:30:31: Neighborhood Topography Takeaways and Residential Drainage
- 00:32:09: Further Tools to Understand Soil Infiltration and Drainage
- 00:33:53: Flood Risk Mapping Using FEMA and Redfin Resources
- 00:36:08: Analyzing Land Cover and Opportunities for Improvement
- 00:38:04: Moving into Interventions and Site Analysis Details
- 00:39:45: Floodplain Intervention - Swales and Rain Gardens
- 00:41:23: Beautiful Spots - Rain Barrels, Porous Alternatives
- 00:43:33: Porous Driveways - Reducing Lawn and the Hell Strip
- 00:45:11: Wetland loving plants, Community advocacy on city owned spaces
- 00:47:19: Storm Water in Depressions and Pollinator Gardens
- 00:49:29: Psychology Behind Landscaping Preferences and Fitting In
- 00:51:09: Conventional vs Ecological Landscaping Differences
- 00:52:30: Status, Symbols, Good Neighbor, Health, and Luxury
- 00:54:07: Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames: Cues to Care and Intention
- 00:55:30: Patterns, Celebrating Seasons, and Public Perception
- 00:57:07: Signs and Shifts in Perspectives/Behavioral Changes
- 00:58:27: Curiosity, Relevance, and Sparking the Love of Landscaping
- 01:00:04: Conway School Information and Wrap Up of Presentation
- 01:01:11: Public Comment - Snow, Moving From Impervious Surfaces
- 01:02:18: Public Comment - Impervious Soils and What Can Be Done
- 01:03:44: Public Comment - Dutch White Clover Replacing Grass
- 01:06:11: Public Comment - Drought Conditions and Water Use
- 01:07:17: Public Comment - Standing Water and Season Changes
- 01:08:40: Public Comment - Mosquito Propagation and Drainage Pitch
- 01:10:10: Public Comment - Concerns About Maintaining Spaces
- 01:12:30: Thank you Kate Chalakus, Green and Grape Announcements


Part: 1

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Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for being here. Um, I'm gonna How many of you uh came to the beaver talk? That's three. Okay. And how about the soil sponge talk?

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One. Only one. Okay. So, a lot of new people. Um, that's great to have you here tonight. So, um, I'm Nancy Hazard. I'm with Greening Greenfield and I'm going to be your MC tonight. And since you all

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didn't come to the one last time, I won't feel so guilty about saying a few things that you I said last time. So, um, I'm going to say a few thank yous, a few words about Green Grieffield and about the theme that we're talking about this year, and then I'm going to hand it

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over to Mary Westervelt who's going to introduce our speaker, Kate Chalakus, and and there'll be Q&A after that, and we'll explain all that. So, anyway, few logistics, bathrooms. Uh to get to most of the bathrooms, go back the way you

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entered and go down the stairway and you'll find bathrooms there. And there is one bathroom over here on my right. Um >> easily be heard from out here. So do use the ones downstairs unless you really want to use this one. Um, I'd

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also like to thank the Second Congregational Church for hosting us in this beautiful room. And I'd particularly like to thank Dorothia Satirus and Mary Westervelt for working with me and and Green Grief on this

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program and the other programs that the Nature Pollinator Group organizes. I'd also like to thank uh this bunch of uh Grey Greek people here tonight. Edie Heinman who met who who is at the door,

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Becca King and Carol Leon at the welcome table and I don't know if Louise is here because she's not but um so helping with the logistics and and all that kind of thing. So, thank you for them. And I also want to thank uh Jaden James who's

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with GCTV. He's at the back here. um and he's recording Kate's talk so that you all can listen to it again or pass it on to your friends. Okay. So, um most of you probably know about Greening Refill, but I always

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repeat this that we're an all volunteer group. We were founded almost 20 years ago now. And our goal was to work with our community and make Greenfield more sustainable and resilient. And I always like to remind us about

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what is sustainability, what does it look like? And it looks like the place where social justice, environmental quality, and economic vitality overlap. And we work in many different issues. Um recently we've been working on programs

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like this restoring our climate and biodiversity work on housing youth and other and films collective learning and uh please visit our information table after this talk and go to our

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website and check it out. So um let me see I'm on the wrong page. That always happens. So um I want to this is our final talk in the

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series of water and our climate and um our theme why we chose our theme is our real concern about water and we've learned or we knew when we started that our planets there are planet yes it's drying but that the continents are all

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drying Um because and then we learned that our planet has lost 50% of its vegetation in the last 10,000 years and vegetation drives the water cycle.

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So how many of you knew that statistic? I'm just curious. Yeah, it was a shock to me when I learned that. Fortunately, before you dive into deep depression over the whole thing, uh we also heard some good news

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from Australian climate scientist Walter Yen, he says that if we increase vegetation by 4%, we could significantly stabilize the climate. So, I guess that's what we're all about

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here. Um, and excitingly, people around the world are planting billions of trees, literally. And last week, um, I ran across an article that I shared in our our listerve about the Great Wall of

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China. And when the Great Wall of China was built, they cut down all the forest near the thing, you know, for security reasons. And probably also they needed to help them build the wall. But um and the area became much more desertified

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than it it had been in 1978. I did not know this. I just saw this recently. Uh they launched China launched a great green wall project with the goal of vegetating that whole area u

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by 2050 uh to reduce sandstorms and other issues. Um, and then I saw a an announcement just last week that reported that scientists have been watching that area and they say that now

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carbon is being sequestered in that area where they have been planting which is just feels like a miracle to me and I mean it just shows that it can be done. So, so I was curious how many of you

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are on Green and Greenfield's list serve. Oh, quite a few of you. Okay, that's great. So, um the list serve, anybody can share news and events that have to do with sustainability. And if you're not on that and you would like to be on

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our list serve, please come back to the um your registration table at the end and and sign people up. Becca wants me to talk about the evaluations, but I'll talk about that after the talk, but thank you for the reminder.

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So, um, okay, I'd now like to introduce Mary Westervelt, who is going and she's going in the wrong direction, and she's going to introduce Kate. So, here you go, Mary. Thank you. Thank you.

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Actually, I >> this this goes to the computer. >> Okay. Yeah. All right. So, uh, you're all here. So, I'm sure you all read the announcement about Kate's talk and her bio. So, you already know she's a

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landscaped architect and she's a teacher of ecological design, landscape architecture, municipal planning, and a researcher exploring the interplay between ecological processes,

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environmental behavior, and aesthetics. So, uh, our question that we all hope to get answered is how can we nurture the environment in our own yards and at the same time work on that aesthetics

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aspect, draw people to the landscape. And we read that Kate has experience with landscape master planning, green infrastructure design, and environmental permitting. So, um, I'm sure she's has

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got lots of plans for how we can do these things that we we want to do. We're excited to learn what these terms can mean for our town and our personal spaces spaces, especially with regard to water management on our property and in

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our town. So, I will turn it over to Kate so we can learn those things. All right, just gonna start my timer here so I stay on track. Thanks. Thanks for coming out tonight and thanks

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to Greening Greenfield. It's a really incredible organization and really special to have a community-led organization do what they do for almost 20 years now. Um, so really grateful and happy to be here to share some information with you that I've

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encountered in my practice and research. But we're going to start with a a question for you. And my ask is to think of a memory, a positive memory that you have involving water of some sort. So a

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lake, a pond, a river, a puddle, the ocean. Just think of a positive memory you have with water. I'm not going to make you share it with anyone else, but just conjure it in your mind. Hopefully everyone's seeing seeing a little something in there. So, hold hold

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on to that. Um, I was very lucky and privileged to grow up on a lake and a swamp in eastern Massachusetts. We used to dodge snapping turtles and play with painted turtles and get our shoes stuck in the mud. But something I noticed as I grew up was that this lake started

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having a lot of issues with water quality. So we started getting gigantic weeds and invasive plants. And a big issue there was development that was happening along the lake, which you can see in this photo here, which was increasing the amount of runoff that's

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running off of those surfaces into the lake. And that runoff contained some pollutants. It also contained nutrients. And nutrients are what's are found in fertilizer and that's applied to all these lawns along the lake. And a lot of that runoff was causing these weeds to

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get enormous and gigantic. They feed off of that those inputs. And so now they're in this battle with herbicide, the community fighting about how much do we herbicide, when do we do it, is it toxic to us, to all the other critters. And there's there's a lot of debate around

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this. And this is not an isolated uh situation. It turns out that at least 50% of water bodies that have been assessed, tested are polluted, they're impaired in some way across the United States. So this is just the ones that

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have been tested. And if we zoom in just on western Massachusetts, here's Greenfield and here's the Birkers. All of the lines, the squiggles that are red, yellow, or orange are impaired waters. That doesn't mean you can't swim

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in them. It just means that they don't meet one of the designated uses. And a use can be swimmable contact fishing. A use can also be uh supporting aquatic life. And so for some of these they

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multiple uses are not being met. For some of them it's just one. But the idea here is there's a water quality problem in Massachusetts and across the country. Another problem we're facing is a water quantity problem which is volume. And so

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floods they are a natural process. Flooding is why we have incredible soils in our river valleys that support agriculture, but they are also a a risk to our own property, our buildings, our roads. And

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so we're seeing this happen, an increase in flooding events. And data does show that there's been a 71% increase in the amount of precipitation that fell on heaviest days from 1958 to 2010. So, we're seeing a pretty dramatic change in

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this. I'm sure many of you have experienced this. I've experienced this. They've also mapped that over 400,000 households in Massachusetts live in the 100year flood zone. Um, so that's a one

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way to think about that is a 1% chance of flooding in any given year or about a 26% chance of flooding within a 30-year mortgage. And so this is a a challenge that we're facing. So what are the causes of water pollution and flooding?

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These are might be things that are familiar to you. As we build, as we develop in our waterheds, we put a lot of imperous surface on the ground. So that's roads, that's parking lots, other hardcaped surfaces. It's also our

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rooftops of our buildings. And all of these things prevent water's ability to infiltrate into the ground. So you get a lot more runoff. It's sheeting off of those surfaces and going very quickly and very polluted into our water bodies. We're This is a photo I took of irrigating the asphalt that I always get

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a kick out of every time I see it. Um we're also building in flood planes. We've done this for a while, especially with mill towns. They powered our mills. Um but we're seeing this increase in severity in floods and that's becoming even more of an issue. Industrial

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pollution is still a problem. Um so these are outfalls. These are pipes coming off of factories that are still releasing contaminants, pollutants into water bodies. Same with agricultural runoff. And this isn't to to demonize any of these things. We need to live somewhere. We need to grow our food. But

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there are some uh we're looking for ways to mitigate some of the issues that we're seeing with water quality and flooding from these uses. And so residential development is part of this picture, too. Studies show that 40 to 60% of the nitrogen fertilizer applied

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to lawns ends up in these downstream water bodies. And that's a nutrient sounds like a good thing, but in excess, it really does affect those water bodies ability to support all the organisms that are in there and to be healthy for humans. And also, as uh Nancy shared,

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the water cycle means water is all connected, right? Our drinking water comes from somewhere, too. So, keep that in mind. But usually so runoff from our roofs, from lawns, from driveways, our streets, uh it might enter storm drains

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in the street. And often what happens is those go underground and dump directly into waterways. This is the large majority what happens with that runoff. It doesn't get any treatment at all. And studies also show that when you have

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within a watershed 10% of that cover is impervious. So 10% is parking lots or rooftops, you start to see impacts on stream health. So that's the 10%. Once you get to 25%, you start to see some pretty drastic changes in water bodies

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ability to support life. And that kind of helps us understand why water bodies in western Massachusetts, it's such a forested landscape. Like how are we having this dramatic impact? It really is an outsiz impact. Folks are probably familiar with the

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term watershed, but for those that aren't, um, the land is moving water in different directions, right? It's sloping in different ways. A watershed is defining all the area that drains to a particular point. Um, and so if you're developing 10% of that watershed, you're

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starting to see negative impacts on those water bodies. So lawns tend to accompany imperous surface. So where we're developing, we often have lawns and some statistics. You also might have heard that it's the

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single largest irrigated crop in the US, more than corn and soybean. It's very thirsty. Uh there's at least 30 63,000 square miles of it in the United States. And this was calculated using NASA imagery. Um, and what you also might not

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realize, and I didn't at first, is that lawn is is is not a very pvious substrate. So, impervious surfaces, 95% of that runoff is going to leave. Some of it will evaporate. In in lawn, a

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pretty high percentage of runoff is also going to move off of that. You see a lot more infiltration into the soil in meadows, in shrubby areas, in forested landscapes. And part of that has to do with the the root masses of the lawn,

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the fact that it's very low. There's no leaves intercepting all the runoff. And also, when lawns are being mowed, that compacts them, especially with riding equipment that's going out every single week, every two weeks, you start to get soils getting compacted, and that prevents infiltration.

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So, how do we do things differently? So, before we get to the the fun interventions, uh I'd like to start with site analysis. That's what we start at at start with at the Conway school because we're trying to propose solutions that respond to the existing

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conditions. So my hope here is to share some uh tips for you to understand or get to know drainage on your sites and in your neighborhoods and then we'll get to the fun pretty pictures soon. I promise. So what I challenge all of you to do is to become a storm water sleuth.

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Print out a map of your neighborhood from Google Maps or whatever you choose. Zoom out a little bit. We're gonna we're going to do this for my house down in Florence. And I want you to take a stroll or a drive or however you get around. And ask

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yourself these questions. What is the topography like? What is the landscape like? What is uphill of your site? What is downhill of your site? Is water flowing onto your site from where? And then where does it go when it leaves? What can you just see when you're walking around your landscape,

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navigating it? And I want you to diagram where the land slopes downward. So draw arrows showing downward slopes. And in this case, a few observations. So there's the red is is my house. I notice

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that west of the house, there's a hill here that's shedding water in lots of different directions. And then I noticed that when the water leaves my site, it's kind of flat, but it seems to be going in one of these directions. Also noticed a little wetland across the street

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there. And so just walking around on streets. I don't encourage you to trespass on private property, but you can get a lot from wandering around the streets to figure out where water might be going. And we're going to zoom in a little closer around the house. some

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interesting patterns that uh you can see that um that I encourage you to take a look for. So in this case, the water coming onto my site. Actually, let's move back a second. So remember how I showed the top of the hill? What we can kind of glean from this very crude

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drainage diagram is my site is probably just getting runoff from over here because once I'm over here, the runoff is going somewhere else. So I'm not getting runoff across a giant area of land or a massive mountain. It's still a pretty small area, but that doesn't mean that it's going to have no impact on my

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house. So, zooming in a little closer, I see this is the top of a hill. This is me. And I also notice there are two streets that are running across this landscape. And something you can also take a look at is does the street have

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storm water infrastructure? And by that I mean a curb on the edge of the street and a storm drain. Does everyone here know if their street has them on the top of their heads? Yeah, you've noticed these things. Great. So, the curb is basically a little dam, right? So, it's

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going to be taking runoff from the street and putting it in the storm drain and then dumping it untreated into some other water body either close or far from here. So, if I'm if I go and I actually label all those storm drains and the curbs on my makeshift analysis

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map, I can make a few inferences. One is that the runoff from the top of the hill is probably getting caught in this street and being brought somewhere else. The runoff from this area is also probably getting caught in the street moving somewhere else. And maybe there's

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actually not much runoff entering my site. So, here's a picture right in front of my house. So this is the runoff coming down the slope and those curbs are funneling the runoff along the curb and then into the storm drains that are

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going to be along the street. However, the reason I have this picture is because this was a big storm event. It was in the fall. I noticed the water was getting really high almost to the top of the curb. My storm drain was totally clogged with leaves and other debris.

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So, I was out there with my husband shoveling it in the pouring rain with an umbrella and of course had to photograph the storm water. So, something to think about here is that, okay, my house might not be getting a lot of runoff, but what if it rains 8 in like it did in Vermont

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a couple summers ago. This curb is only 6 in high. I might get some of that runoff. So, these are just some some prompts to hopefully uh bring home with you and and help you start to look at your landscape a little more closely.

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And so, talked about my site. So, it's it might not be getting run off in the small storms, big storms, I might have something to worry about. Looking at here, the houses across the street, I might be concerned uh about

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runoff entering those homes from this hill because they don't have a street that's taking that runoff away. However, being at the base of a hill isn't always a bad thing. If you have runoff coming onto your site, you might be able to harvest that, right? If you want to grow plants, if you want to have a little

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pond, water is also a resource. Another takeaway here is that runoff from these lawns, from the street is going into that underground storm drain system. Where is it going? I found out because I like to do this as

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a hobby. It turns out there's my house. All those curbs go, they connect to pipe underground. It comes out right in my backyard around the corner. Snakes all the way. So literally I'm polluting my own backyard basically um by using this street and it's but then it's kind of

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going down a little stream and continuing on its way. So then the next prompt is how does drainage work on your site? And you might know this very well already. Some might be new to their home or haven't thought about it before. But just a few questions to ask yourself. Where does

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the water flow when it rains? You can go out and diagram this. Ideally, in a rainstorm, we send our students out to their sites when it rains intentionally. Where does it pool? And then how long does it take? Is it there for a day, for two days, for three days, for 5 days?

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And then try to notice, are there areas where the lawn or the vegetation is starting to erode, where you're getting bare earth, and you can see that water is streaming across it, and you're worried that that might be a reason. So, in my case, the runoff from the street largely going in this storm drain except

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when it's clogged or we get the big rain event. But I also notice that runoff from my gutters is going around the house and to the backyard. So, that makes me feel pretty good about my foundation. I do have these two little

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areas of pooling. In my case, they go away within a day and it's not really an issue for me. Um, something else again to think about here is because I don't have runoff really coming onto my site, the only water I'm getting here for my raised

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beds and other plants here is from the sky or a little bit from the gutters. So perhaps less than the the houses that are at the base of the other slope. So looking at your house, ask some questions. Oh, thank you.

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>> Slipping. Yeah. So, where is water moving down the roof? Where are the gutters? Which direction are they going in? Where are the down spouts? Maybe you don't have gutters and the eve of the roof is long enough that it's

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pulling water away from your house and it's going to drain away, but many people do have gutters. Then look at the bottom and see what happens. Does it just disappear into the ground? If it does, do some research and try to find out where it comes out. Maybe it connects to the city's storm drain

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system. Maybe it comes out in your front lawn. Is there something you could do where it comes out? Some gutters, a lot of them, empty right at the base of the foundation and go right back into the foundation. This is very common and a a

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problem that can be resolved. One one solution is getting some gutter extensions that bring it away from the house. So, this can help with that issue. And then look at the land around your house. Is it the land sloping away from

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the downspout or just from the the eve the roof line of your house? That is a good thing. That's called positive drainage. So that's good for your basement, for your foundation. You want that bit of drainage. It doesn't have to be significant. Even a 2% slope will

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drain water. But you do want a little something. If you don't have a little something, you can talk with a contractor. And in some cases, if you have enough space, you can add soil and regrade that landscape a little bit so it moves away from your house.

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If water is coming from your neighbor's property, take a look and try to get a sense of is it coming in my foundation or is there a little ditch or something that's bringing it around the house and protecting me from that? For people who want more of a challenge,

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and this gets a little nerdy, but I want to put it out there for those that do, you can go to a website, and this all the links that I'm talking about are in a handout that will be posted on the Green and Greenfield website. There are also copies of it in the back. Um, so

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don't worry about writing all this stuff down and getting addresses. They're all there. They're live links. You can click on them. This is a website run by the town of Greenfield. You can enter your address.

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Your home will likely pop up. You click on it. It will bring you to your home. On the left, there's something called layers. And again, you'll have this recording so you can all listen and walk through it again. Layers has lots of really cool

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information. a really fun place to look at maps if you're really into maps. The one I'm looking at right now is going to be contours. So contours are a way of mapping topography. Are folks familiar with contours from hiking for the most

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part, maybe a little bit. Okay. So the idea here, they're showing where the landscape is sloping and in which direction. The higher number, so there'll be a number on each contour. I have these here because it's they're hard to read. Higher number higher in

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the landscape. Lower number lower in the landscape. Here we see this is where we are right now by the way. So the pizza place right below there we see a slope start to happen and we can tell because we have a higher contour 236 going down

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to 226 going down to 216 going down to 206. So we see in this case these contours there's a 10- foot change in the number and the a 10 point change in the number which is a 10- foot change in elevation.

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So this point here is 10 ft lower than that point. So this is starting to give you a sense of what what the topography is like on your landscape. Something that will be a little less crude than if you're just walking around in your neighborhood. And what you can do, and I

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think this is really fun, is diagram how water flows based on topography. So what you do here, you have to know two things. Water flows from high to low points. Water's it flows downhill and it's going

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to move perpendicular to the contour. So you basically get a a pencil and you're going to draw a bunch of arrows perpendicular to each contour going downhill. So, this is not how the arrow will go. It's not going to go this way, this way. It's not going to go uphill,

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right? Perpendicular. And you can do this, apply it to your site, and you start to get a sense of how water is flowing in your neighborhood. And it's a lot more detailed than what you might gather on this just wandering around the street. So, here we see that water is kind of shedding in a few different

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directions. So, I would be kind of wondering if this building is getting some drainage up against that building wall and what they're doing about it. This is just another neighborhood in Greenfield that I pulled up. So, contours, it's high a

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high point over here. I see there's a low point 127 down there and then the land is going uphill on the other side. And so if I take those arrows and draw them again from high to low, perpendicular to contours, you start to

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see how water is moving across your neighborhood landscape. On when contours are closer together, it means it's a steeper slope. You've probably encountered that hiking. When they're farther apart, it's flatter. So here are some takeaways that I would

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have. Um, some of these houses here, they might be getting some water runoff going into their home. So, I'd want to make sure that they are able to capture that water and bring it around their house so it's not going right into their foundation wall. Houses here have a

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little more space behind the building and where it starts to get steep. So, they might have a chance to maybe put in some gardens that take advantage of some of that water, maybe some things they can eat. I also look at the river and whenever I see a water body I'm thinking about

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flooding and here I see these houses are uh about 30 feet above the river and I can do that by counting the contours. These ones are a lot closer. They're at a lower elevation. So I might be wondering are those subject to flooding?

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That's just a question that would come from looking at a map like this. So, our students when they work on residential sites, they make a diagram just like that for a neighborhood. And this is something you can do as well that'll give you a sense of of how drainage

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works and how your site fits into that picture. So, this is a similar situation where this is a house. This is the top of a hill and drainage is flowing across the surface downhill. And then she noticed that there was a street with

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curbs. So that that water is going somewhere else. Um if you work with a consultant, an ecological designer, they can zoom in and do a much more detailed drainage analysis around your house. There is

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actually free contour data that's much um more fine grained than the data that was in the the town viewer, but it does take uh several steps to process it. So, it's not something I could figure out how to teach in this um in this session,

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but it but it is out there. It's available. You can also hire a land surveyor who can make a topography map to show you exactly those little nuances of where water is going in your landscape. And you can also ask a designer to look for where does it pool?

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What type of underground infrastructure do I have? Do I have a French drain? Where does it go? Where does it end up in this one? It ended up on the front lawn. So, these are are options you can explore if you want to learn more about your landscape. And just another um

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another uh insight into that that green field map viewer, it also has lots of layers about soils and one of those is infiltration. So it actually maps where soil is very poorly drained and

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where it's very well drained. So if I'm having a lot of issues with flooding and pooling, maybe that's why. It could also be compaction for another reason. It could be surface drainage, but it helps tell more of the story. And there's a lot more layers than just this under

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soils. Lots of soils information in there. They also have a layer that will show you where all those storm drains go. So, if you want to find out, it's a lot of fun. Check it out. If you don't, does anyone not live in Greenfields? Okay, great. There's there are often

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versions of this for other towns. Usually, they're for cities that will have their own version of this. There is also an online mapping program for the whole state called Mass Mapper. This is also on the handout, also free. It's a website, so you can type in your address

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and it also has lots of layers that you can add. So, it has contours, it has soils, it doesn't have storm drains, but it'll give you some really interesting information. It has some wetlands, and these this is all coarse data. It's not super precise, but it gives you a

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picture of what's happening in the landscape. So, another uh mapping exercise is for flood risk. I wanted to put this in for folks who are concerned about flooding. Um, we don't have great free resources

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for identifying flood risk. What we have are FEMA flood zones. So, these are uh boundaries. They're areas that describe areas that have a 1% chance of flooding in any year and a 2% chance. Something

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to note is this is based on historical data and some of these maps are 50 years old. So these certainly have not accounted for climate change since and in the future. So they're they're a little conservative. You can find these in two places. If you live in Franklin

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County, you have to go to FEMA's website and that's also on the handout. If you live in I think just about any other county in Massachusetts, they're available in that state mass mapper program. And basically the takeaway here is if you're in the 100year zone, that's

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kind of the one to be a little more concerned about. The 500year is is also something to think about. Folks who are within the 100year probably know it because uh if you have a mortgage, you have to have flood insurance. One other tool that's free that you can

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use is on a a realtor website, redfin.com. You type in your address. This is the Conway school. A little map icon shows up. You click on that. It'll bring this picture up. You go to

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flood. And this is going to map uh riskprone areas. And this is based on more information than FEMA. So it takes into account more recent uh flood insurance claims. It also includes some predictions about what'll happen, some

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flood modeling. So, this is a resource. Um, it's it's a private resource. Um, so you have to kind of find it within Redfin, but it is out there. Few more questions, then we'll get to the the fun stuff. Although I think this

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is really fun. Um, what is the land cover? So zoom in on your site and diagram which areas of the landscape do I actually use? So which areas are lawn, which areas are hardscape, whether it's asphalt or concrete.

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If it is lawn, which areas do I actually use to hang out, to play botchi, for friends to come over and play volleyball, and which areas do I really not use at all? And those are areas that you can think about for a different type of intervention which we'll get to in a

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moment. So often um when development happens a lot more land is cleared than there needs to be and sometimes uh we have a lot more lawn than we actually use. And as I mentioned before when you're riding over this with a riding mower over time

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it will compact the soil. Um so we're looking for opportunities to rough make that surface a little more rough. So, in this case, they have some meadow grasses, they have some shrubs, they have some trees. You're going to get a lot uh you're going to get more

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significant runoff reduction from this compared to just lawn and hard hard surfaces. It doesn't mean you have to get rid of everything. It's just trying to find those opportunities to to shrink the lawn space in a little bit and the pavement as well.

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So, now we're going to move into interventions. So, if you've done kind of your crude analysis, hopefully you have a little more understanding how water moves on your site, where does it pool, where the where the gutters are, how they work, where the downspout goes,

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where pavement and lawn is not being used. If you have floodprone areas of your site, if you're working with an ecological designer, they'll do some other analyses like look at sun and shade, underground utilities, vegetation. and they'll look at legal constraints like setbacks and wetlands

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regulations. They might analyze habitat. What type of habitat is the property already providing? How is it connected into larger wildlife corridors? Um, so site analysis is a is a very big and beautiful robust process. Um, but hopefully this should give you a little

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sense of how the drainage piece works. If you're working with a designer, they'll synthesize this into a design for your site. um the Ecological Landscape Alliance. Are people familiar with this organization? No, mostly not. So, it's a an organization based in New

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England, but it serves the country and it has a directory, an eco directory of landscape designers with an ecological focus, so you can find folks that are doing this work near you. Uh our students also do fall projects for residential sites in the Pioneer Valley,

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and I have a handout here if you want to learn more about that. But let's get into interventions. And the idea here is to share some resources you can follow up on. For the DIY folks in the room, I have some resources that are very thorough about how to design and implement these things. But these are

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also strategies that you could bring to a contractor and ask them, could this be a good fit for my site? So for folks that realize that they're in that 100year or 500year FEMA flood plane or you're within those blue areas mapped by

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flood factor and red finin. Um one resource you can look to FEMA does have these these pretty great guides to um kind preventing damage to your home during a flood event. And they talk about adjustments to the house. They talk about raising the house, things you

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can do inside the basement and so forth. But we're going to look at the surface flow drainage. And so one strategy we can talk about if you're having a lot of water coming down a slope and your house is basically a dam and the water is

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coming into your basement staying there or it's just staying in the backyard. It's a giant wet area. One strategy you can use is by building a swale. And a swale is basically a a U-shaped channel and it's going to be pitched around the

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house. It's probably going to come around both sides, but it depends on your site. And it's going to bring that runoff around, catch it here, bring it around, and ideally bring it to a rain garden or some type of area where it can infiltrate into the soil. Usually the

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water course so the the middle of the swale is surfaced in stone because when water is concentrated and it moves even grass cannot handle that and tends to erode. So sometimes you'll have some stone down the middle but you can plant the sides with perennials and grasses

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and things that provide a lot of habitat. So if you're working with a contractor they'll create a grading plan um or with a designer and so they'll figure out how do we massage the topography to make that swale? How do we dig into the ground, bring the water around, create

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Berms so that it doesn't flow into your neighbor's yard or back into your basement in a different way? Uh, and that they'll look a little something like that in terms of what these can can look like in real life. So, usually you do have kind of a water course with your

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stone, but you can plant the sides. They can be narrow, they can be wide. It's an opportunity to provide a lot of habitat and start picking up some of that water. the rain garden itself. So, a rain garden is usually meant to describe an

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area where water is collecting. It's not moving. A swale is usually described for where where water is moving in a direction. The rain garden is where it stays and infiltrates into the ground or evaporates. And there's a fantastic guide. This is through Montgomery County

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in Maryland. Um that has detailed instructions on how to how to figure out how big it should be, how to excavate it, when you need to replace soil, when you don't. Has a great plant list also that's very applicable to our our location. And these can be a really

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beautiful spots and they can be great habitat for lots of critters. Um, these are not really helping with biodiversity, but they can help in other ways. So, rain bales, some of you might have those. A great way to collect runoff and reuse it, especially when we

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have droughtier summers. If you don't have space, if you live in a very uh a very urban lot and you don't have room for swailes or rain gardens, you can collect runoff from your gutters and from your sump pump if you have one of those, if you have a wet basement, and

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you can bring it to basically an excavated area that's filled with stone. This is what one of those could look like. And then it'll infiltrate into the soil. Um, so that's another strategy that you can look into. If you have an asphalt driveway and it's

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starting to crack and it's time to replace it, that could be a great time to look into a porous alternative. So, I I prefer kind of these interlocking pavers. So, they are concrete and that comes with an energy footprint for sure. Um, but it does

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allow water to infiltrate. They make these out of plastic, but those I've seen fall apart pretty uh easily, and so I'd be concerned about those. Um, they also have porous asphalt and concrete, so it's a very smooth surface, but water can infiltrate into it.

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And just finding those opportunities to reduce lawn and the photos I'm sharing are from walks in the community. So these a lot of these are some of them are done by designers, some of them are DIY projects. Um, but in this example, we see what we call the hell strip. The

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hell strip is that sad patch of grass between the road and the sidewalk. And they're filling it with perennials, with grasses, um, butterfly weed and echanatia, plants that they their maintenance is probably cutting back once a year and and weeding it. And it's

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it's beautiful. They love this rugged, hot, salty area on the side of the road. And no one has to mow it either. And in this example, there actually is a little bit of lawn around the house, but the slope out front they weren't using for anything because it was kind of steep.

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You're not going to hang out there with a chair. Um, so planting slopes with vegetation, perennials, shrubs, trees will help a lot with runoff issues. And here, every little bit counts. So this is the part of lawn they wanted to keep.

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And they wanted to keep a little bit along the sidewalk. And then they have this nice little patch there. There's more naturalistic approaches, more ferns and shrubs. Um, shrubs are a great way to replace

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lawn. Um, they fill in, they take up a lot of space. I find that they're an economical choice. Um, because you don't have to buy lots of little baby plants and then space them one foot apart. You get one larger shrub, it fills up, it starts to shade the ground, you get less

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weed competition. And then just starting to get that appreciation for just foliage. Here there's ferns, there shrubs, bigger shrubs. Here there's oakleaf hydrangeanger and some native hydrangeas that really fill in space, provide great habitat, too.

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Another strategy, if you have a wet spot and you don't feel like you need to drain it, it doesn't bother you, but you're you don't like looking at soggy lawn or maybe the lawn's not very happy there, you can re replant those with uh more wetland loving plants. And the

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native plant trust has a website called the native plant finder and this is also on the handout where you can enter in your conditions. So you can say, is the soil moist? Is it wet? Is it in the sun? Is it in the shade? What do you know about your soils? are they clay? Are they sandy? And then it'll give you some

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options that then you can take to the Sami nursery or any nursery and try to try to sleuth out. Another um strategy is uh kind of advocating for treating runoff in uh city- owned spaces, municipal spaces,

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and a lot of cities are doing these um bumping out into parking lanes where parking is not being used. Making curb cuts, so cutting through the curb to allow runoff to enter the rain garden where it can be evaporated, infiltrated,

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and runoff is treated instead of running into our wetlands. There's some interesting examples in Detroit where they're using vacant converting vacant lots into big rain gardens basically. So this is the old house foundation. They're pumping rain water. The storm water is now into here in going into

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this depression filling it with plants. Um here's an example I think in Philadelphia of finding those grassy medians that just end up in the roadway that no one uses. maybe they're paved or maybe they're lawn and and bringing

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storm water into those spaces or just replanting them as pollinator gardens. This is an example in Burlington where it's one of those just marginal lawn spaces that people walk over, it gets compacted, it doesn't look so great. But

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a community group uh getting a community group together and seeing can we plant that with something that's a little more biodiverse. Um, one example I really like, this is in Northampton. Have folks seen this site before? No. So, it was a really a really steep slope that uh was pretty

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dangerous to mow. No one wants to be on a riding mower using any type of mower on a slope like this and certainly no one's using it. Um, so this was a community group. I think it was the Western Mass Pollinators and then Owen Worms um of Abound Design. they

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partnered and they worked with the city to get rid of the turf and convert it into this flowering pollinator meadow. Um, and so this is doing a lot. It's preventing people from having to mow that area. It's providing really great

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habitat. It's really beautiful and interesting. And it's also helping with that runoff issue. Now, something to think about here, too, and just to acknowledge is that these types of plantings can look a lot different than what we're used to than conventional landscaping. This is very different than

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this. So, especially in the winter time, or really this time of year when the the new growth hasn't come up, and we've left all of the dormant the dead seed heads and the dead grass standing because that's where a lot of insects

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overwinter. we want to leave those there, but it it does look a little rough this time of year. And so that's part of the question of how do we become more comfortable with that in these public landscapes. And that's the the last part of this presentation. And now

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we're shifting into my research side from the practice side. There are hundreds of studies about why people manage landscapes the way they do in a residential setting, about yards specifically. And what they found is that there's very

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little correlation between people with environmental knowledge and environmental values and ecological landscaping. And this is contrary to people who have environmental values and uh more energy efficient light bulbs or energy efficient vehicles. That doesn't

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translate to the landscape yet. And they've also found that the leading reason that's preventing that from happening is this concern about fitting in well with the neighborhood. And this isn't to say that's the only barrier. We know there are many more and I'll get to those in a second. But this is a big

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one. And this is because conventional landscaping does look very different again from these alternatives. So if we kind of look at the anatomy of the convention, we can notice a few things that it tends to have large patches of

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mulch where plants are spaced apart. The plants are not allowed to touch. The shrubs are hedged. We have a very uniform lush green lawn. A lot of non-native flowering shrubs, non-native annual plants. And in the winter, all of

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those uh perennial seed heads and grass stocks are removed. They're not left there for us to see throughout the winter time. If we look at an ecological alternative like a meadow or a rain garden or some type of mixed planting, it's a lot different. In the rain

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garden's case, it's a depressed form. It's actually a ditch. It's low. And there's some psychology about that, too. The plants are very densely planted. And this it has a habitat value. It also helps prevent weeds. Um so you're not getting those large areas of mulch that

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you get in conventional landscaping. We also see a mixture of grasses and flowering perennials mixed together. They're not spaced apart neatly. And sometimes these are native species that aren't as common in nurseries. So people aren't as used to them.

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In the winter time, we tend to leave those again those stocks and those seed heads standing or uh in the rain garden to prevent uh more runoff from happening and to pro provide habitat. But this is from a news broadcast about people not

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liking rain gardens. Right? So, and this is the image they chose to use for a reason. So there's some fantastic scholars who have written about the psychology behind conventional landscaping. And what they

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write about is that the the moan lawn, the sheared shrub are signs that of scrupulous maintenance. They're signs that someone has been there to take care of that landscape. And people have come to associate those signs with status, with people's work ethic, with just

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being a good neighbor. You know, you're doing your civic responsibility. you're taking care of your landscape and also openness. So, being able to see across the landscape and associating that with the values of also being a good neighbor, being transparent versus

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having a jungle in your front yard and also greenness, the lushness of the lawn, the brightness of the annual flowers, associating that as a symbol of even health, like you're you have a healthy landscape because it's so vibrant or as a sign of luxury. And Joe

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Nassauer who's one of a fantastic scholar about this, she talks about the concept of an aesthetic of care. So we're so attached to this because we see these symbols as signs of care. And that's that's important to us as human beings and as neighbors. And something I

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noticed too is that when that con when conventional landscaping when maintenance stops altogether, it's been abandoned, something terrible has happened or I was sick for two weeks and my landscape looked pretty bad when it was when it was um a really growing

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growth spurt time of the summer. We start to notice that some of these traits start to resemble some of the um traits of this more ecological alternative. So plants are growing into each other. They're not spaced far

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apart. The gr the lawn grass is tall. It has a combination of grass and more broadleafd plants. So some of the traits here are what we see. This is a rain garden, right? Some of the traits here are what we see here. So it's not surprising that people would have that

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negative reaction to this landscape looks uncared for. This is an excerpt from a town bylaw from a town uh here in the Pioneer Valley uh that one of my students found because they were doing a project and it says that owners are responsible to keep

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their property in a reasonable state of repair. Grass will be kept no higher than 6 in. Leaves, grass cripplings will be removed. Damaged branches will be addressed. And then the student contacted the the town and said, "You know, my client

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really wants a meadow. She's also interested in a rain garden, like do do we need to worry about this?" And they said, "As long as that planted area is not the result of neglect, it won't violate the ordinance." So that just underlines all of this, right? There you

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go. Um Joe Nassauer, so the same scholar who wrote about um the aesthetic of care, uh published this concept of messy ecosystems, orderly frames. And the idea here is that you create an orderly frame for your messy ecosystem. And these are

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uh known as cues to care. So symbols of intention. And that can look like in the meadow a moan path. So if there is no path here, people might think this place has been abandoned. Now we see, oh, this is on purpose. Someone was here.

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Looking at the rain garden, it's a neat edge. We And they even put a little mulch in there. That's a symbol someone was here. There's a very uh sharply shoveled edge around this rain garden. Uh here we have hosta forming the frame

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for the Messio e ecosystem inside. Another cue to care that she talks about is uh patterns like legible patterns in the landscape. So if you if you intermix all of the plants, you do end up with this wonderful habitat garden. And I

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think it looks really neat, but not everyone will. If you want to make something that appears a little more intentional, you can make a pattern. So here they're grouping the grasses, grouping the other flowering plants. Here we have a whole drift of one type of plant, a drift of another type of

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plant. So we see that these are patterns and that's a sign to us that this was done on purpose. This is a more naturalistic approach. So we have a big clump of one plant, a big clump of another, another patch there. But we see that this is this is there someone

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designed this, someone intentionally did this. And also uh thinking about those this time of year when there's not much to look at perhaps, you know, are there ways to kind of celebrate that part of the season? Um, so some some cities have

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put daffodils and bulbs in their rain gardens to remind people this is there on purpose. It's it's serving a reason. Um, or this is up at Conway. We have some alium bulbs in our blue stem meadow before things the warm season grasses come back.

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Signs are also a cue to care. So they tell people again this is here on purpose. Um, there's a lot of great examples of that. There are some scholars, some scholars in philosophy who posit that if you know something,

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your aesthetic reaction to it can actually change over time. And so once you start looking at these landscapes and you understand that's milkweed habitat and if you pass by it every single day, eventually you'll start having a positive reaction to this even

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in a different location. And I've observed that in myself. So I believe it. So some examples of signs and signs, you know, especially this time of year when people aren't used to what this looks like.

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But also a word of caution that scientists have also shown that knowledge is not a reliable driver of behavioral change. This might not surprise you. Um but this they've proven through their research with human human

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subjects. Um something that's interesting that they did have found though um is that what does work if is if you speak to the relevance. So you make it very relatable to a person's life and you speak to their values. What

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they've also found is that sparking curiosity can break through some of those shortcuts people take in their thinking like I have to have this belief because everyone I identify with has this belief. Curiosity is is the key that can make people think differently.

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And I'm convinced that this is why the pollinator campaign has been so successful because they're not going around shaming people or throwing long lists of facts. They're making people curious about the inner lives of insects and and that's worked. That's gotten people interested.

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And so I also think part of this is shifting our our relationship with our land from maintenance and from a chore to to caring for that landscape. So if we know how water is moving across the landscape and then know about larger

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habitats we're connected to, can we see these types of interventions as symbols of care in the same way that we see lawn as a symbol of care? Can we reframe that relationship while also acknowledging that none of this is easy? So what I've asked you to do here for your own

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landscapes is to conduct analysis, figure out how to design something, how to manage it over time. And all of this requires time, which not all of us have, resources, which not all of us have, and knowledge. And I've given you some, but

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that's just a starting point. But the benefits are are like this. We can create landscapes that help protect those special water bodies that you have these memories of that provide habitat that also connect you to your landscape

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in a different way. So that's the goal. Just to wrap up here, a little bit about the Conway School. So this is where I spend most of my time. We're a graduate program landscape design and planning in Northampton. Our students have get a master of science in ecological design

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and they work on real projects for real clients. So in the fall they do work on site designs for residences and there are some handouts here about that. In the winter they work on town plans. They're working on a bicycle plan for Greenfield right now. I don't know if anyone's participated in that. And in the spring they work on largecale

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landscape design. So we have some handouts here if you want to take a look at those as well. And again there is this resources handout that will be posted has live links to all of the resources I sent including some of those studies about environmental psychology if you want to dig into it. I'm losing

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my voice, so we'll wrap up there. Thank you so much. And we do have time for questions, comments, reflections, ideas. Yeah, >> I'm just thinking I mean we're literally

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at the end of winter and so your discussion which was wonderful was about how the rain runs off our property but in the winter time snow >> the first thing I thought of is a lot of that is moved off of the imperous

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surfaces driveways and roads >> onto the sides. >> Does that have a significant does that make a significant what you were describing or is it such a small amount that it doesn't >> uh it does make a difference. So one

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thing we always look at is is snow pile and its effect on the soils beneath. So it can cause compaction. It will leech uh pollutants and most notably salt. That's the biggest issue with snow piling into those planted areas. So that's one. The biggest issue I see with

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snow is it uh clogging our clogging the storm drains and making a lot of bumpers in the landscape and then we're getting more rainstorms in the winter than we used to. So, this is still that question of um when there isn't when we get a big snowstorm like we did this winter, water

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can't penetrate, the ground's frozen, but we're getting more rain, what happens then? And I think that's still a big question. And I've been talking with some people about that. Um, and we're not quite there yet about what the solution is, but it's it's something

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that I'm definitely concerned about because that's the h that's the pattern we're seeing is more rain in the winter time. Yeah. >> I'm sort of astounded because I I don't I don't have an excess water problem on my property, but I do have problem with

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impervious soils. >> Sure. it don't really absorb the water. So, it's very difficult even get plants to grow because it's mostly clay and gravel and mostly clay and less gravel. >> So,

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aside from just tearing it all up and adding compost, I don't know how you get the soil a little more permeable. >> Yeah. Uh root structure will do a lot for that. So, part root structure of the plants. So there are a lot of plants that are used to growing in clay

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conditions that you can cultivate and the native plant trust native plant finder you can sort by that which will help. Um there are some seed mixes that have been designed for conditions like that and and logging roads. Um so places where the soil has been compacted over

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time by vehicles and and other things. Um, and so plants that will the root systems will help get into the soil and and help break that up and cause some more infiltration, but some soils will be limited. Um, and in some cases, and this they do talk about this in these

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guides, you can excavate some soil and replace it with gravel and then a layer of permeable soil. And you're you can make basically these little sponges in the landscape that even though they're not going to be infiltrating as much as my sandy site down in Florence, they

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will be doing something and they'll be slowing down the overflow into the system because a big issue with how we develop is that we're concentrating water and it's entering water bodies all at once. So they're getting these shocks to the system. So if we can slow it down

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even just a little bit, the theory is that that'll make a difference. Um, so it's just two cents from a quick reaction, but with the caveat that every landscape is so different. And so it really does require a very thorough analysis process. And our students spend

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two and a half months just analyzing each of their sites before we tell them to think about design because it really takes that much time to get to know a place. There's so much nuance there. And they look at geology. There's

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What do you think about a Dutch white clover replacing grass? >> Um, yeah, a lot of folks have written about this. So, there is um a nitrogen fixing benefit of that. Um, but there are a lot of folks who would prefer plants that serve pollinators a little

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bit better. So, you know, in my opinion, and I encourage this of my students, is just hearing some different perspectives, deciding what's important to you, what's your value. You know, some people can't have flowering plants in their lawns

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because their kids have uh severe allergic reactions, right? So, they can't be stepping on anything like that. For other folks, their goal is they want a native landscape and they want to maximize habitat. For other folks, they want to mow less and they want to put less fertilizer on their lawn. So, if

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you can get clover in it and it's decreasing how much fertilizer you have, then maybe that's your benefit. That's your goal. But I'm less dogmatic about things than than some folks are. Yeah.

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>> Excuse me. I'm wondering, you're focusing obviously on excess water and where it goes and how it happens, but we here also have drought conditions. >> So, I'm wondering if you have other kinds of designs that would deal with

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that and how we use water totally when is our use of water too much. >> Yeah, I agree. I really wanted to fit that in here, but it was hard to know what to cut out. Um, but yes, you can grade topography uh to catch water to create swailes and berms where you're

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planting shrubs, productive shrubs that produce berries and other things you can eat and nuts and trees. And this is a big permaculture concept is using perennial plants and grading the topography to store water and then and feeding those plants. So that is something that a landscape architect or

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landscape designer uh should be trained in doing. They can design grading plans that do just that. And we've we've done that on some fall projects, particularly for sites where people are looking for productive landscapes that are very thirsty and need a lot of water. Um, so

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that that is part of this, but I didn't fit that in here >> another time. Yeah. Yeah. >> So, I'm not sure if this is exactly the same, but what about the areas where you have standing water >> and you think, okay, rain garden, but

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then the season changes and there's water there. Yeah. What do those plants do? Will they just adapt? >> So, usually a rain garden pallet is going to have plants that are that can tolerate both inundation and drought.

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So, so there's a there's a a spectrum of plants that can do that and are used to it and they're they can thrive in conditions like that. Some a lot of folks come in and they think the rain garden are wetland plants. Wetland plants are not going to do well in a rain garden because rain gardens are

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designed to drain in 72 hours. Um because the idea is to prevent breeding for mosquitoes which can happen usually like 10 days. But most of these facilities like rain gardens are designed to infiltrate within 72 hours. Um so you're not planting them with

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wetland plants usually if you're unless you have a wetland in the backyard. Um, but there are plants that can handle those types of of flushes, flushes of water and then long periods of drought. >> Yeah. >> Two questions. What you just said about

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mosquito propagation. >> Yeah. >> 10 days. >> I think I've been hearing a much shorter time. >> It's all over the place. Um, yeah. I don't know. That's that's I think that the three I think the 72 hours for me is is the the sweet spot for getting a

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landscape to drain out. At the same time, any landscape is going to have mosquitoes. I have a very dry landscape and in the summertime the mosquitoes they are really bad and so we we don't go outside after a certain amount of time. You know, I'd love to build a

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screened porch. Um but so that's just it's just another part of the ecology that I feel like I have to deal with and um I think designing these facilities to drain makes sense and I understand people's concerns about it but I also

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think that you're going to have mosquitoes regardless unless you're spraying in which case you might have fewer. Another question. In a French brain or swale, what is your minimum uh grade pitch? So,

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>> uh minimum is two to three two to 3%. >> Should do it. Yep. 2% will drain water and that's the same pitch for away from your house foundation. >> Reflections. Yeah. >> Is this a question or a comment or a

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thought? >> I suspect that many of the people here do not have a yard of their own. >> Sure. >> But maybe they belong to a church that has a lot of lawn >> and it might be something to think about

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what what can you do with big spaces like that? And and I know one of the one of the hesitations is someone has to take care of it and the guy who does the lawn mowing knows how to run the lawn mower and doesn't know about not

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disturbing the gardens. But >> do you have any anything to >> Yeah, that's a big thing. I mean it's true. So maintaining these ecological alternatives does require a different set of skills and I think those are things that need to be taught and the ecological landscape alliance is holding

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forums about these with landscaping companies to try to change that. It is it is a bigger uh conversation. Um but a lot of skills like weed identification, learning how to divide perennials, how to manage competition. So these are

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these are things people would have to learn to manage these other alternatives. And part of that is being trained. And then there are some cases where you can make guides. So here are the weeds that are cropping up here, pictures of them, look for them, weed it

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this time of year, this often. Here are the pictures of the plants we don't want to stay that we don't want you to weed. They're supposed to be here. Um, so there are a lot of municipalities that have created those guides and they've also created web apps um for their team.

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So they kind of mobilize residents to take care of the public rain gardens and other public green spaces and they have apps that help them identify plants and take care of them. They the stewards of of those spaces, green stewards. So

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there are some precedents for that, but it it is a challenge. It's it's tough. But I do think that it makes a difference when you put a space like this in in the public. People see it every day. And that comes back to that concept of how do we change what we see as beautiful? The more you see it and

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the more you know about it, it'll change your perspective over time. >> And also church is really into moral behavior. >> This is true. So I' So I've heard So I've heard. Yeah. >> More. Thank you. >> We have a few announcements before we wrap up.

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>> We do. Thank you so much, Kate. Thank you so much. That was fabulous. And I learned a lot about uh the patience of having to analyze things. I always want to jump into it and just do it and then see what happens. And I

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guess that also kind of works too. So uh thank you so much and and just bringing together all that we've been learning in our in this uh talk that we've been doing this series of talks of water and our climate. And this is our last talk

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uh in our series. And um couple of announcements before we leave. Um we have a bunch green and grapes has a bunch of of events that are coming up. And um some announcement over here about a movie that we're showing uh about

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reinventing education and the title of that movie is most likely to succeed. Um and it's going to be followed by a very lively discussion uh by Doug Selwin who um you may have read about in in his in

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the newspaper. He's been running an education column and is very much against the MCCAST testing and doing something different. So that's going to be that's going to be at Lava and there's a um announcement over here at the table. um also enable uh greening

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green fields holding a several uh community workdays uh in collaboration particularly with youth climate action Franklin County uh which I never quite know how to pronounce the acronym but I'm going to call it WAF just for uh see

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how that works and and other people. So, on Saturday mornings, there will be a bunch of um uh times that we're going to continue to work at restoring Miller's Meadow, which is on the Green River. And we're going to be planting over 200

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trees uh this fall um with the city and with YAF. And have any of you been do you all know where Miller's Meadow is yet? Because we've been Oh, quite a few. That's great. So, we we planted over 650

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trees and shrubs last year and now we're adding some more. Um, we're also going to be doing some Sunday afternoons and uh that and on two projects and in this case um well, they're sort of different

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kinds of projects. They're more in preparing to do something else. So, at the Johnz on Community Center, we're going to be smothering invasives uh like mugw wart and bindweed that's growing underneath the sweet fern on the west side of the building and

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preparing soil for planting next this coming fall. And then at the um Greenfield Public Library a couple of years ago, we held a couple of um workshops to do some brainstorming about how that what that space might look

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like, what we could do with the understory where the grass is. And we finally got have permission to work in that area now. And so again, we'll be working with WCAF and with the Greenfield Public Library Foundation and

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we'll be preparing the soil there. uh to for probably a fall and then a spring planting. Um so I'm excited about what what that's going to look like. So um finally on your chairs there was an evaluation form when you first came in.

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Please fill that in. Uh we really your thoughts are really important to us. And you'll notice there's two sides to that evaluation form. one is about this evening's talk, but the other side is about what kinds of things you want to learn about. What kinds of things would

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you like to hear us um bring to you to in your whole learning of about our landscape and our world and what we can do. So um thank you again Kate. Please let's

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thank you and then please