Remembering My Horticultural Background
Many of you (but not all) know that in my past business career I was a landscape architect and, along with that comes some really wide experience with site design and planning. One aspect of that comes to mind as climate change unbalances land that worked perfectly well before we stuck our developmental finger in the pie.
Land…all land…absorbs water, until it doesn’t
The reason it doesn’t is something called compaction and compaction has many causes, some of which you might not be aware of. Cattle are huge compactors of grazing land, large animals with tiny feet, out there walking around on wet ground, tons of compressive force on each carefully placed foot.
Construction sites are another. All that heavy equipment driving on and off the site, over which the contractor spreads four inches of lovely topsoil and drives away. City parks are yet one more, with decades of foot traffic. The force of your foot hitting the ground is between four and seven times body weight. In a typical day, your…