My House on the Wetland

NOTE: The following was written four days ago. I just got around to finishing and publishing today! Enjoy.

It has been a busy busy couple of weeks. NO hikes. Not one. You would think with the COVID19 scare and everything that I would be making it a point to get outside and hike. Well, I am, but I haven't. My time outside has been in the service of my yard, and specifically, its capacity to produce food and support a healthy ecosystem. That said, things are looking good for the rest of this week. I may even adventure out tomorrow.

The yard is taking shape. The bird feeder is well-established at this point, a familiar jaunt for many birds in the area. I've enjoyed the uptick in nuthatches over the past two weeks. The grass is beginning to green. Some daffodils are starting to put up green shoots in the bed next to the deck. But there is work to be done. With any moderate rainfall (or snowfall two nights ago), the intermittent brook runs over her banks, flooding more than half of the "yard" and reminding me that this is not a healthy hydrology.

My house and my neighborhood were built on wetland. My edge of the neighborhood was the last to be developed, in the 1950s, and it directly abuts a tributary to Trout Brook. This type of development attempts to squeeze water into smaller and smaller areas, freeing up more space for more profitable land uses. But, as we see with my backyard during moderate or heavy rainfall, it is a problematic approach.

I like to think of the ground as a sponge. The development of impermeable surfaces on the land on this wetland (houses, driveways, roads) has squeezed the sponge to the point where its capacity to hold water is severely reduced. And this capacity is important. When we have enough of it, we retain control of the water. Risk of flood goes down. Our riparian and wetland areas are healthier. But in this neighborhood, ths sponge is squeezed. Rain water quickly fills and then runs right over our inundated sponge. Yards flood. Basements flood. As I've seen once before as a kid, a particularly intense rain event can flood roads.

So how to help? My goal is to create a natural succession from the red maple swamp on the other side of the stream, to my house, which should remain above the water table at all costs! My strategy has two objectives - to maximize the potential of what exists in the yard, and add to that potential with introduced species and ecosystems. The first part is a post for another day. There was a massive willow tree that fell a few years ago. Its stump (4 foot diameter) is producing plentiful sprouts, which I hope to regenerate into a smaller iteration of the old behemoth.

But right now I am working on the ground level. In the coming weeks, I will be saying goodbye to about half my "yard," as I now know it, and re-seeding it with native grasses, sedges, and wildflowers. A recent trip to New England Wetland Plants in Amherst Massachusetts provided me with one pound of their wetland seed mix, or "WetMix." It was pricey, but the plants provided thrive in wet soils. Included are fox sedge, lurid sedge, fowl bluegrass, blue vervain, blunt broom sedge, fringed sedge, green bulrush, swamp milkweed, soft rush, New York ironweed, blue flag, bristly sedge, wool grass, and everyone's favorite spotted joepye weed.

All of these projects put together, I hope, will improve the quality of my yard, both as a sponge during rain events and as an ecosystem for the birds, insects, and everything that calls the wetland out back home.