Water, water everywhere -Resources (Education)- E
Solar Home Chronicles 5
Tuesday, 25 September 2007
Water Management
Our building lot is quite wet. Underneath the weedy grasses is mucky clay. It being mostly flat where we want to build, water can pool almost anywhere. I have been concerned about the prospect of swarms of mosquitoes chasing me out of that large vegetable garden I have always wanted. But Eric is an optimist at heart. He looked at the runoff, the clay and the muck and immediately thought “A pond _ we can dig a pond to attract the water runoff, and it will become a visual feature for the lot!” And then he thought “Fish! We can stock the pond with fish, and they will eat the mosquito larvae, and then we can eat the fish!” He’s the only guy I know who can look at an obviously rural, pastoral scene and think of fish! And, it’s a good thing our lot is zoned for this activity!
So started our site planning for our whole building lot.
We asked several forester/environmentalist friends to take a look at our lot and give us advice. When consulted about the wood lot, we were advised that we could probably take half a cord of wood from it every year, and still sustain it. Otherwise, we should just leave it alone, and let nature do its good work. We could also cut down the weeds and blackberries that surrounded the struggling wild blueberries, to encourage their growth.
When consulted about the pooling water in the field, an expert friend said `Oh, there’s nothing there that one hour with a bulldozer won’t fix”. When asked about his opinion of the pond, he replied “You won’t know until you dig it. It could be clay all the way down, and you will have a wonderful pond. Or, you could dig past the clay into some sandy soil, and then your pond will drain out into the soil, and you’ll be left with one big hole.” We could bore a deep hole where we want the pond, to see what is under there, so that our excavation efforts would not be wasted.
We were concerned about building our home near the lowest part of the lot, where the ditches are. We reminded ourselves that a passive solar home has no basement, so we won’t have to worry about waterproofing anything that lies underground. As well, given the drainage and insulation needs of the solar slab foundation, our house would be more than a foot higher than the surrounding land by the time all of this was addressed underneath.
We planned to take the soil from the pond dig, and use it to berm up against the north wall of our house. This would mimic building the house into the side of a hill, for added insulation. We would also use that `one hour with a bulldozer’ to reshape the field a bit, with runoff channels and slopes to encourage water away from the house and into the pond and existing ditches.
Everyone recommended that we plant lots of trees on the north side of our lot, to get a head start on the windbreak that we would need to protect the house. So, as soon as spring had sprung, before we began any real construction on the house, I dutifully trudged into the woods and dug up young fir and spruce trees (great for wet soils), and replanted them along the north lot line by the road. I have to remind myself that it was good exercise to do that, because later on, all of my trees would be dug up when the water and sewer lines were put in from the road. So, exercise was all I got out of it.
Next: an exercise in mapping and staking out the house