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America’s Reservoirs Are Filling Up — With Dirt

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  America’s Reservoirs Are Filling Up — With Dirt Drought is shrinking the water supply. Wildfire is stripping the landscape. Then extreme rain arrives and washes part of the hillside into the reservoirs designed to protect us from drought. Before worrying about whether a reservoir is half empty or half full, perhaps we should ask another question: how much of it is now filled with mud? When we think about drought in the American West, the images are familiar: exposed reservoir banks, dry riverbeds, struggling farms, shrinking snowpack and arguments over who should receive the remaining water. But an article from Bloomberg recently highlighted a much less obvious problem. Dirt. Wildfires burn vegetation from hillsides. Intense rainfall then falls onto those damaged watersheds. Instead of being intercepted by leaves, roots and forest litter and gradually soaking into the soil, water can rush downhill carrying ash, sand, soil, stones and even trees. Some of that material event...
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Your Garden Is Not Untidy—It May Be a Wildlife Hotel

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  Your Garden Is Not Untidy—It May Be a Wildlife Hotel Before putting the garden to bed for winter, remember that something may already be sleeping in it. For generations, autumn gardening advice has often followed the same pattern. Cut everything down. Rake everything up. Clear the borders. Remove dead stems. Sweep the leaves. Make everything look neat and tidy before winter arrives. There is certainly nothing wrong with maintaining a garden. Paths need to remain usable, diseased plants may need removing, gutters need clearing and lawns cannot necessarily disappear beneath a thick blanket of wet leaves. But perhaps we have taken tidiness a little too far. What looks untidy to us can look very different to a beetle, butterfly, bumblebee, hedgehog or small bird. A pile of leaves can be shelter. A hollow stem can become a winter refuge. A seed head can become a food store. A pile of old logs can become an entire miniature ecosystem. Perhaps the autumn garden doesn't always need clean...
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What Should You Do With All Those Autumn Leaves? Don’t Throw Away Free Fertiliser

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  What Should You Do With All Those Autumn Leaves? Don’t Throw Away Free Fertiliser Every autumn, nature delivers tonnes of free soil improver—and we spend money getting rid of it. Autumn leaves can be irritating. They blow across the lawn, block drains, collect on paths, fill gutters and somehow appear again five minutes after you have finished sweeping. The obvious response is to gather them into bags, put them in the green-waste bin and let somebody else deal with them. But perhaps we should look at fallen leaves rather differently. A tree has spent an entire summer using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to construct those leaves. When autumn comes, the leaves fall naturally to the ground, where fungi, bacteria, worms and countless other organisms gradually break them down. In a woodland, nobody arrives with a leaf blower and a council green-waste bin. The leaves become part of the soil. So instead of asking: "How do I get rid of all these leaves?" perhaps we should ask:...
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More Rain Is Coming: Could Your Garden Capture 1,000 Litres Instead of Sending It Down the Drain?

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  More Rain Is Coming: Could Your Garden Capture 1,000 Litres Instead of Sending It Down the Drain? “The water you pay for next summer may be falling on your roof for free this autumn.” Most of us have become accustomed to thinking about rain as something to get rid of. It lands on the roof, runs into the gutter, disappears down a drain and, within a few minutes, we have forgotten all about it. Then six months later we can find ourselves standing in the garden with a hosepipe, using carefully treated mains drinking water to keep tomatoes, hanging baskets and vegetables alive. There is something slightly illogical about that. Perhaps we should start treating rainwater as a resource rather than a nuisance. And once you actually calculate how much water lands on an ordinary house, the numbers can be remarkably large. Start With One Very Simple Calculation Rainwater calculations are wonderfully straightforward. 1 mm of rain falling on 1 square metre = 1 litre of water. So: Potential wa...
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