 I welcome to you this sustainable landscape air shop, how to construct a sustainable landscape. My name is Kent Bruce, I'm the director for the town of Winchester. This workshop is being held on Saturday, May 25, 2023 at Winchester Public Library. Special thanks to the library for the proceeds today. Today's workshop is one part of a larger project being undertaken jointly by Winchester, and this three-time project includes workshops like one today, but also the creation of a sustainable landscape handbook that will be ready by the end of the year. Joining me today is one of my co-project directors, David Warden, from town of Arlington, DC, where I'm a planner there. Unfortunately, Erin Warden, the director of tiny community development in Stonewood, couldn't be here today because she's also a new partner. Our presenters today are Leslie Fanger and also Lindsay Corsi from Fuller Engineering, which is a firm with expertise in landscape architecture and design and construction, among other things. Today's workshop is the second and three-part series. The first one was held in Stonewood about a month ago. That was on designing the sustainable landscape. Today's workshop is on implementing a sustainable design for your landscape, and the third will be held at Arlington on June 8th at a lot of the morning at the Arlington Community Center, and that's on the 18th sustainable landscape to have to be planted and implemented. We'll be filming today's workshop and a recording will be available on all three town websites. I'm not going to be through your health screen right now, but you should find it pretty easily just by Googling. I want to thank Arlington Community Media for providing a camera that we're using today and also for editing this video, having a fact. We appreciate it, and without further delay, I'll turn it over to Leslie. Thanks, Karen. This is the second series of three workshops that we're doing in conjunction with preparing this guidebook. The funding came through the state. Can you help me with the name of the grant? Accelerating climate resilience to grant from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. Yeah, I got it. Thank you very much. So at the end of all of the workshops, we're going to take all the information that we've gathered through the process of pulling the workshops together and prepare a guidebook. This was a result of getting the grant that was building on another sustainable project that we did for the town of Concord, and it was very well received and being used very well there. And so we're sort of building off of that experience with this workshop and the guidebook as well. So we want to try to educate and encourage residents, businesses, landscape contractors, property managers, and condominiums. Anyone who's doing any work in the environment landscaping, we want to make sure that they are aware that there are options to the traditional kind of unsustainable practices that we all work with, we need to. So again, we're in the second, this is the, today it was just a library. There it will be all on how to sustainably take care of your landscape. Even if you didn't start with a sustainable mindset, there are ways that you can make your land more sustainable and provide a healthy environment for you, your pets, the animals that visit your property, and all the love symptoms that help make the world go round, as they say. So the agenda, what we're going to do is just do a quick review of the principles of sustainable landscape. We started with the design that was a workshop that did any of you attend to that one? Yeah, good. I've got some familiar faces that's great. And again, that supported as well. So if you're interested in learning more about sustainable design and want to see the presentation that was given at that time, it's available on the time of absence. Durability is definitely something you want to spend a lot of money and then have it not work. So we want things to be durable. Energy efficiency, try to get things out of the way stream, reduce what you're using and use less of a plan. We want to increase the amount of rainfall that gets back into the ground and help support all the outpours that many communities depend on for their drinking water. And then dovetail on that, water conservation, use less water because it's a real resource that is in jeopardy of a lot of communities. Maybe not here in Winchester or Arlington or Stoneham, but in Concord they were really worried about their water resources, which is why they wanted to start talking more about sustainable landscape. And then try to get materials that are durable and maybe sourced locally. So at the end of the presentation, we're going to do a little activity that kind of gets you thinking about your own yard and planning for things and kind of made it up. So I think it would be fun to give you a chance to collaborate and learn a bit more. So principle is sustainable landscape construction. I'm not going to repeat the whole thing, but we want to conserve water and energy, reduce waste, decrease runoff, and make sure that soil is really valuable entity in your landscape. It supports all your plants and supports the ecosystem with all its values that you don't need to go into. So we did this sustainable design and now we're going into talking about construction. When we talk about creek water as a resource, what does that mean? It means don't put the hose on. Remember that you need to. Make sure you don't have leaks in your hose. That's all common sense things, but it also applies to the outside. You're doing landscape projects or maintaining your plants. Try to get something, a plant that's a native plant. We're suggesting we understand there are some beautiful plants that everyone loves and wants to plant. But maybe as you start to transition towards more natives, try to get about 70-30 of native plants. 70% and maybe 30% of those beautiful ones that maybe aren't native, but we really love them. I know I have lots of them. I think it's about that plant though. We're moving based species. This is the big one. That's pushing out our native plant species, birds, bees, insects, everything else. If you have a native species, they're pushing the good native materials out. They're just very aggressive. In my own yard, I'm really thinking about going around and just pulling them out. But we'll talk about that some more. Again, the old adage, reduce, reuse, and recycle. This is going to be organizing principles for our presentation. I'm not going to read all of these because we're just going to jump right into it. Prioritize based on what's it. Lindsay and I are just going to tag team a little bit on this. You want to share? Here you go. That's it. That's the good one. Okay, so step two. You'll notice what you can accomplish now on this week. You're not going to be able to do everything that you ever will want to do to your yard. Based on whatever budget you have available. You've got to set aside how much you're willing to spend. Can you give them greater time? And what you can reasonably get done with your budget over your access to time. Yeah. So once you figure that out, you need to figure out who is actually going to be doing the work for. Is it going to be you? Is it going to be a contractor? Are you going to tag team it? If it is you, you need to understand what you are reasonably capable of doing physically. You can't just neglect the cost of physical labor on your body and the cost of time that it takes to do a project. It's going to take longer to do something yourself than if you hire a contractor. So just because something's cheaper to do by yourself, it doesn't mean that you should negate the other factors that you are going to have to put in to accomplish that piece of work, that project. So if you want to find a hire contractor, get multiple bits from reputable sources before you start the work. Just make sure that you're hiring who you want to hire. Do your research. And if you're going to do a combination of you and the contractor, all over the steps of the work. So then next, you know what your budget is. You know what projects you want to accomplish. You know your timeline. It's how much time you have to get things done that you want to get done. So the only thing you don't have yet is your tools and your materials. So likely you'll have to purchase these things. But in the case of tools, I mean it depends what you're going to need. The hand tools where you're going to have to rent construction equipment from somebody. Does your neighbor have something that you don't that you can ask them to use? You might not necessarily need to go out of your way to spend money and get the things that you don't have. You know people who have those things. So if you do need construction equipment. So like I said before, you have to figure out, be realistic with yourself about what you are able to accomplish by hand. For instance, like you have this photo down here. It's sawed being ripped up. These pictures are actually courtesy of Winchester's very own Ken Crewen. He's doing lazy work in his yard. You can see here. Sawed is being removed. The existing one is being removed and rolled up by this machine here. You know, is that something that you're able to do by yourself with manual tools? With a shovel? Are you able to do that or do you need to hire someone to do it? So really think about the process of whatever project you're trying to accomplish in your yard. And just be practical. You don't want to start getting into something by hand and realize you're right over your head. The body hurts and your back hurts. You can't get it done quickly. Also if you're going to use construction equipment, if someone else is going to be operating equipment, driving a truck into your yard for delivery, or using some other piece of equipment, how are they going to get it? Do you have a fence? Do you have a gate? Are you going to have to, you know, change some things about your yard or you can reverse so that things, so being able to get anything out of your yard. These are things that you need to think about because when the truck pulls up and then you realize your driveway is lining up for the delivery truck to get through. These are things you have to think about before you get to this. Before you do any kind of digging, just call it safe. It's really before construction to figure out what kind of utilities might be on your runway in your yard. If you're just doing small projects by hand, smaller things might not necessarily be necessary, but it doesn't hurt. Also you can check MassMapper, which is Massachusetts GIS website, where you can also find similar information like how close you are to wetlands or the bodies of water. If there's like any conservation areas that you should be aware of like really important like native habitat areas that you would like to know about, you can pretty much find any of this information and tons more on MassMapper. So it just might be interesting to look into and see what's on your property and how your property. So, you've got your project. Now where are you going to put it? How large is your project going to be? What is your project area in your yard? The best way to visualize this is to lay it out physically in your yard with either garden hose, wood stakes, spray chalk, landscape flags, rope, where you can hitch and shovel to outline your area if you have a garden bed that you want to put in or something like that. This will just give you an idea of spatially what you're working with and then you can figure out how much material you need based on the area of the square footage of what you've outlined. So this will help you come up with estimating costs for material that you need. We're talking about removing invasive species and it's really a part of the site preparation. The whole goal is to get rid of things that are bad like invasive species, not all of bittersweet, the list is very long unfortunately. So that's always a first step and that's something that you can do like garden mustard is, this little plant and just to let you know we are going to be giving you a list of invasive species that are handed out so be part of the game. But some of the basic species you can just see in your yard or you can just rip it out and make sure it doesn't go to seed and you're done. So invasive species needs a bit more help than that. So you can just go and keep cutting it back until it just dies and it's not getting as nutrients and it's gone. If you're going to use herbicide be very, very careful about how you use it. The best method of using herbicide is rather than just taking it around us and spraying it all over the place it will stay around forever. So in order to do it responsibly you can just cut whatever plant you have. There's a little bit of a trunk you just paint the herbicide on the trunk rather than spraying it everywhere. It will take a little bit longer for the trunk to die on the soil over time and have little impact to the soil around it. As soon as you're done removing invasive species get something back in that's going to be happy and take over and that's something that should be a native plant. So if you do have a plant in place you've done your design you're implementing it now you've gotten rid of all the invasive species you're going to be planting new native shrubs and trees but you have one or two or three or a whole bunch of plants that really are kind of in the way of your new design. You want to create space with a nice little sitting area and right in the middle of the sitting area is a shrub that you love. So you might as well just dig it up and move it. Transylactic is very important to pay for that plant it's taken a while to get established but it's still valuable. So the process is transplanting you just dig it up you put it aside you make sure it's all watered make sure the hole where it's going to is already prepared so it's simply just taking the thing up walking it over or wheel bearing it over and putting it in a hole I think what we'll do is we'll show you the process of installing a couple videos that show that so we don't need to spend too much time talking about that but watering is absolutely essential I think that's pretty pretty well known. So sawdwells I think Ken had a nice example of how you can just take a machine you can probably go to a rental store and rent the sawdwell over and it pulls it in a nice little wall and then you can put it aside and if you have other long areas that you want to increase you can just use that sawdwell over and then another important aspect of construction or landscape construction is making sure that the soil that you have will support the plants that they want to install so you can go to the UMass Extension Service you send a little back that you're existing soil so that you can figure out does it have the nutrients that it needs to support plant life and if not, what you need to do to make sure that the soil will support the plant life and it's really inexpensive and so worth it and sometimes when I do a job site I'll dig multiple holes and send multiple samples because it's amazing how different soil composition can be even in one yard so it's good to be aware of what your soil is made of so yeah, it's just a simple Ziploc bag and I'll keep it up and I'll send it back within a week with a whole list of constructions you need phosphorus, you need more organic matter you need you have a very clay type soil so you need to season it up to sand and it'll tell you exactly what you need to do it's a very valuable resource that our state provides all citizens of Massachusetts another thing when you start digging up dirt and we have a game like today where it starts raining and all the dirt starts running up to the road you're running into your plant dead it's important to kind of make sure that you retain that and you can call that erosion control because you don't want concentrations of water to start to scurre scurre scurre, thank you just undermine the soil and make it just as big a little bit of ways to keep soil in place are things like jute mesh if you're on a slope retaining walls if you have a slope that you want it to be level the easiest way is to just build it up you can do a little stream bed that's kind of a faux stream full of rocks and when it does rain it has the ability to flow without damaging the soil or something like a rain garden this is a great way to do a whole bunch of ecological benefits to your garden so you're retaining water you're planting plants within the rain garden and you're providing the ecosystem that it's like the both lines and the videos of flowering plants and shrubs is it there over to our shopper yay now we got to the fun part so, now you go shopping so since this is a discussion about sustainability it's always best to if you have stuff already so, if you know somebody wants to get rid of stuff use it if you can find stuff on facebook marketplace or on the side of the road use it, just be creative the less that you are buying new things that have to be transported to you and maybe aren't made sustainably the better but if you are going to buy new things it would be great if they're locally sourced if they're made from recycled materials if they're pervious or permeable like papers and then it doesn't take a lot of energy to create those materials regroup it reclaimed, recycled things awesome you compile old brick stones somewhere in your yard just see if you can use it before you jump to buying new materials the same money in the process I don't like that term recycled so here's just some examples of how you can get creative with painting in particular so these are all pervious options meaning that water can easily percolate into the ground the water from the ground there are still moderations where there's sheets of water flowing off of the hard state into and provide body water along all the bones from the cars and carry with it we want pervious options if possible so these are all good alternatives to the traditional asphalt concrete you can do intermolking concrete papers, those also look nice we're asked for a cleaning you can have a driveway like this or even a patio like this you can do something simple like a driveway it's called a story a permeable brick so water is able to pass through all the beams and can charge into the ground pervious asphalt there really isn't any problem pervious has oh yeah see what this picture is trying to show us is that the water is stained in this one spot where it's being poured it's not running off the sides and it's not going to cause an erosion issue where the water is running and it's pouring it's running so fast it's taking all the soil with it you can see here it's just flowing right through the ground it's pervious I can add more to that it's technology that's been developed actually at UNH in New Hampshire and it's very specific open asphalt system and you have to have this very pervious material underneath the asphalt so it's not like you get a driveway you're sitting on asphalt it's not automatically going to be pervious asphalt you're going to request it specifically but it's much more prevalent in the marketplace these days in fact there's a great example in Sudbury there's a little bit asphalt on that site it's over crossing on one side of the team if you drive up in there everybody would be asphalt there as per this oh over crossing is it durable? yes you do have to maintain it and there's a special vacuum that you do have to make sure the pores are open so in order to do that you take a lot of the things off on the side disintegrate they start to fill in so part of maintaining pervious asphalt is to vacuum it and it's a special machine all of these options here are pervious also referred to as permeable workable rice they all pretty much need the same thing it's that water-raising to pass it's our gravel or shell or a moving driveway like this where you're ultimately doing less painting overall because you just have two strips for tires that's a good option because you're just not it's not as much material you can have grass in the middle or harsh stone or cobblestone or something like that there's tons of variations of this type of design but the idea is just that we don't need as much surface area of painting materials in the strip for tires the term that we're trying to move away from in construction is impervious because the very nature of impervious is that water-raising runs off and takes all of the oil and so forth with it and ends up in the rivers and streams and ground water so so much of the items so part of what I already mentioned these are just some ideas of what you can what kind of materials you can get without spending money how it's over it I know you all have props in your eyes you do a little bit of digging you're going to get a file like this right when you do something that you can make with a dry a dry river bed I think I'll take a picture of it but it looks nice and you add plants it looks very lush this looks like a swimming bed that dried up and it's it's good for that plant swaps I would say if you guys aren't in Facebook groups already for plants or gardening or whatever just join them if you're interested it's just a wealth of information everyone sharing things, asking questions it must feel really good to like be able to answer some of these questions knowing the answer and you're the guru on that specific topic but there's a lot there's a lot of resources available online groups of people that are doing things like this plants swaps and have free things that you can kind of pick up that they don't want anymore just figure out those things because you don't necessarily have to go out and buy your stuff urban, this is something I discovered recently but it's just a term for basically old concrete that's been used and it's broken now look at this nice patio and walkway it looks like natural stone almost but it's just fresh concrete who would have thought another application for that here's a picture of raised tinder bits and materials it's just concrete and lots so, supposing you do buy new materials like mulch or stone dust or something you need to prepare for how that's getting to your house you're probably going to get it delivered if you're already in delivery similar to what we mentioned prior to this slide you need to account for the space that a truck needs to back into your driveway or wherever you need that material to dump because once that pile of material is dumped in your yard it's staying there until you come in with a wheelbarrow or a shovel it's just you put a wheelbarrow back and forth so there's some planning involved in that especially if you have a big yard and you have multiple projects going on you need to do some staging to ensure that your pile of materials is not going to incur physical labor on your part knowing back and forth with distributing the mulch or stone dust or whatever you want it to be close to where your project site is but not on top of your project site so that you can't work because you have a pile of mulch also it's going to be sitting out for multiple days in a row you need to make sure that you have a truck or something to cover it because it's a lot easier to shovel with stone dust or mulch than drys you'll want to probably have a truck that will be delivered on so that you don't get the material all I mean, if you just have a driveway you probably can just have a driveway and have a truck so yeah, you need to do some special planning so now we're at the install so you have your plant materials say you have a tree that you need planted so first things first you want to avoid creating areas where it's going to be standing order it is possible to plant a tree in the ground then you're most susceptible to rot and it's just stressful for the plant and possibly fail you can do a soil test to determine what your soil might need if you're using all the materials you probably will need to do to amend this soil but if you do get amendments for this soil you must spread them throughout the area where the trees are going to spread and as far as timing for planting fall and spring are best so if you're going to do it in the spring do it before the blood's bright and if you're going to fall it's just less stressful for the tree um if you're going to be planting in summer it's just so hot it's going to take longer for it to get acclimated to its environment so that's like these time grades are really best to do any kind of planting we will all plant things out of these seeds depending on the winter we might have to amend this one but these are just good practices, the best practices and the trees that we've got it's okay you need to work harder to make sure that that tree will get established and plant the tree out of where it works should the tree be so you can see the detail right there we're going to show you a video of the process of digging the tree typically you have a tree and the tree transitions into its root system that's called a flare I'd say slightly above an inch maybe slightly above the adjacent ground a lot of times when you plant a tree it'll settle so that extra buffer helps to make sure it isn't too deep the worst thing you can do with any plant is planting there's several ways that you might receive plant material that you're planting either he's balling or elapsed he's got a burlap staff around it and he's got a piece of wire just a little ball of roots you know they harvest the tree out of the ground and basically package it like so or plants can be in containers more common personal things like shrubs but both can be either all burlap or containerized or bare root which I think is less common material like that if you order from a nursery right it's it's less expensive and the plant material is smaller when you get it your desires to have a fairly mature looking tree then you probably end up getting a ball of burlap variety so just like the way that you install varies a tiny bit based on how you're going to receive your material so specifically for plants that are called burlaps you want to dig a hole that's two or three times wider than the burlap ball itself and the hole you only want it to be as deep as the burlap so like Leslie mentioned you have a root flare with a chunk and a roots meat to be slightly above and it needs to stay brown it needs to stay bright because you don't want it planted too low and you just want to account for that settling for the two below the ground so the best practice now is to cut all of the burlap away if you're able I know I have just like cut the top off before and thought that that was fine and just pull it back, take the wire off and let the burlap and being inspired to grow the hole but I think the newer, better standard is that if you are able to it's heavy but you can get all of the foreign material off the burlap and the wire that is the best case scenario and it's going to be able to spread out more easily and faster so here's a video of how that works do you think I'm going to take this off? yeah, this way do I love it? yeah I just can't find how to press it there you go now you can quit it that can move trees into the hole fairly easily but if you don't have muscle it is so it's going to have two people one person that kind of controls the top of the tree and the other person as well that will fall into the hole and you want to do this as gently as possible to kind of maintain the integrity of that waterfall even with two people that have a big fall these people are mostly going to see that tree now we'll do that tree we don't want that tree I should say the fact is you know sometimes you take a look at the shape of the cylinder that is in the roots are just so tightly bound in that shape that's called the top bound meaning that the roots are just so tightly around within themselves they outgroup the space that they have to grow in so when that happens and you see that they are really tightly boiled if you just place them in the ground like that you know the roots are not going to be encouraged to go outwards into the the soil that we want them to do so what you need to do is gently out those roots at the bottom get them onto the needles that they are able to quickly spread out so they will quickly be anchored in the soil because they are encouraged to spread outwards like they want to do so they are not in this shape anymore so if you have a shrub like a small pranayama shrub you can cut an X on the bottom of the root or with your fingers just like a bone part but pagerns will just start packing away just kind of clean up a little bit so the same goes for a tree or a container so here's a video on how how to do that can it be a stick or can it be a shovel anything just very stringy this one but basically it's just in planting the the material it's just plant so it's a similar planting process but these types of plant material are really they're more fragile because they're so exposed one thing that you can do with column burlap or container materials is root washing which is basically getting them from being in a container or a ball to this to burrow so the other methods are fine but if you're evil this could be this case scenario root washing I should say is basically getting all of the extra material the soil roots so that they're bare and this allows the plant to integrate more quickly into the plant into the native soil that's the point a lot of the trees that are seeding here in England actually grow into the south so it's bringing with it southern clades and just different soil materials so this gives the plant a link up starting planting it's going right into the native soil that you're not going to break through the soil from where it's grown yeah this picture here it's pretty dark but it's a picture of the washing so it's a plant with a tree that probably came in a container and it's being soaked in water or it can sweep all those to get that extra of the plain soil off and we'll get more into molting the next workshop when we talk about maintenance but just some things to keep in mind don't do this this is the volcano over damn the trunk is probably still building up so this is what we should do which is great kind of with a saucer around the base of the tree where when you water you want to water at the base of the plant water at the base not at the leaves we have here it's more effective but creating a saucer it loads water to more water to sit there it's just more effective for me to see a saucer like this when you add the the mulch volcano and see it all at the base why is it bad? it's bad because it's smothering the trunk air and water to get to the root system and it allows a place for careers to go very into and start to be a garden somewhere and it's a thing that landscape contractors I was so made to be some here moving away from these fragments but every so often if you're molting every year you might want to use the roots of the mulch before you put in the mulch down but it hasn't broken down enough already it's a water it's crucial right after you plant something into the ensemble of the water and for the first year or even two years does they have a general rule of thumb for caliber size of trees right so for every caliber each every so if a tree is like three inches the calibers are inches three years to get it established so basically that's how long you have to baby it before it will be good on its own that's a good rule of thumb for trees but also just for anything for the first year just be consistent with the water and you water from the base of the plant not the leaves early morning or in the evenings and that's because the plant will retain more moisture in the middle of the day it might just evaporate immediately and it's not going to retain the water that you just keep it there are things called rain gauges and they're the really low tech it's basically a little cup you stick it in this little point you stick it on the ground that's the low tech really expensive version you can't see how much water or how much rain you've got there are more high tech ones that are a bit little but that's really just a little cup you stick it in the ground or you stick a pail out in the yard and then the shine of it is so often even more low tech I have a question sometimes you see those bags around trees those are in my opinion they give people all sorts of security when I say contractors we want them because they fill them up and then they just go away in their trees and water in my mind it's better to shake a hose and soak and saturate the saucer when we say saucer basically you've done the hole you've got excess material and you basically make a soil little dam around the edge of the wall or the newly penetrated and these alternate there so by just filling up that little saucer that's the bedroom and you just add it slowly soak back in the gator pads I suppose if you know we're going away from you or something and you want to make sure that the water they can do a decent job and I can get a hose it also gives you a chance to go out there yourself and get a hose to get from you for me every spring it's like all around and you're kind of looking at where you are and you're like oh yeah you made it it's like when you're checking up on your friends you know and it's the same sort of thing for newly planted trees you want to make sure they make it for the most essential parts of the new process slowly and gradually tree staking isn't really necessary in most cases but if you have a specialty in any site or community sometimes with like their trees because they're so small and fragile you might want to state but in most other cases you probably won't need to do this like if you do state you want to remove the stakes after a year don't leave them all longer because the tree needs to be able to move freely and get established on its own so the stakes can be needed that way so I will talk about rain gardens so one of the benefits of a rain garden is that they control the amount and they divert the storm water going into other areas basically a depressed area where water can be collected and you plant a rain garden so that the plants are what are collected and all of the water is running off into that area so if you're not playing storm water issues you have like a wet area in your yard that's a good spot for a rain garden because plants are really great at soaking up excess water so when you have the plants there to make and attract pollinators in the process you can have all sorts of pretty plants that are really important and provide a lot of ecosystem services for birds and bees so you will want to take a bowl that's like 6 to 8 inches deep and go deeper but it's just basically you're just creating a shallow bowl where water is going to be able to sit long enough for the plants to soak up and if you're doing it in a really steep hill situation you would kind of want to build a shelf for that rain garden right because you can plant on a slope but it's not really a rain garden at that point really you want it to be kind of like a shallow bowl because the water is still just going to keep running off like this you can build a little shelf for that rain garden and you want to use native species that's the most important part of traditional rain garden is native native land perennials, shrubs, trees native plants now a lot of communities are in the watering you know, intensive still water it's part of the it's a lot it's a new development but not just runoff it has to be the same active development as before development so rain gardens have become very popular in the development world to help achieve this and it also helps to treat the storm water that's coming up the road to whatever the toxins will get absorbed by the plants and remove the toxins from the soil they're going to lead systems so it's a very popular thing to do now we see them in parking lots and residential areas on the streets that's a lot of the same water right there awesome so we're going to get into the activity shortly here's just a quick list of things that I can want you to take home with you after you leave today so do your research on your site it's MassMapper or how you can capture storm water and control a region you can use rain gardens like you've discussed in rain gardens or in the water runoff you can do a dry stream that pertains to all there's things that you can do to prevent water from washing all the soil away from your steep slopes use pervious paving use pervious paving like the birds we saw or the ripping graduates or the inter-rumping pavers or maybe the last fall using burroquois or dryways kaios there are applications for any hardscape that you might build in your garden and use lists paving where you can you can kaiote over the lake or something you want to do something new put a garden there put a rain garden add plants add more natural materials increase the educated areas and ask questions ask professional questions go to their series or ask a designer ask them sustainable questions sustainable passions can we use primitive materials ask them about things that we talked about today to get more sustainable solutions create a budget know how much you want to spend on the project so it's not shocking when you start ordering stuff and buying stuff and it's not at all what you expected and use stable materials please and be creative use things you already have mind us the book that we are showing up on the screen is a valuable resource it's a terrific book and it gives a ton of information that goes hand in hand with this guy that we're going to hold to with could you talk a little bit about launch and what you're doing yeah we're definitely going to expand more on it in the next workshop yeah so don't use dyed mulch all the dark dark brown and black mulch is very likely has dyed and died you want natural wood mulch not too much hardwood there's a bit of a shortage in that material in these days and it's getting more expensive but you want something that's going to break down and add nutrients without damaging your soil which we don't expect you to just don't want to use so whenever you go to the garden center just ask that question and this would be perfect no they have all of it usually they're a reputable garden center or a large garden center they'll have piles of it that you can just kind of look at and ask the owner and you don't want to get any more than never bring mulch above the mulch layer of your plant doesn't matter if it's a perennial shrub or a tree you want to keep the mulch away from the trunk itself during the walking okay so just to recap before we get into the activity start small don't overwhelm yourself by saying oh yeah I'm going to put this new category by myself and do it all by myself in two weeks be reasonable with yourself be honest with yourself that you can easily accomplish there's so much information out there do you have a question in Google that doesn't help you? go on Facebook find somebody who knows more than you about it you will be able to find the answers that they should figure out before or go to the guidebook it'll be there in December ready for the spread don't be nervous don't be intimidated because there are people that can help you ask them questions like I keep saying you already have you can experiment in your art easily when you just use things that you already have and it doesn't have to be a big production so start small and experiment because you have a good idea of what you can accomplish by yourself and also what you want to do down the road great so another fun part so like I said try to get people to know about the process of construction so the rules are you'll have one hour which we started a little late so we're ready to go you'll have $50,000 about a bunch of you'll be given a set of points you can start passing so there's on each of the, there's a list there's a do-it-yourself there's a live-in contract with a cost there's something going to change and change the solution to the issue of the fact are opportunities that you'll see on the sheet and then for each of these you get a certain number of points so get up your calculator we'll use some paper and pencils the size of these is like 10 feet across so the root system is going to be at least 10 feet across in the ground that's all that one is native but it's aggressive Russian Olive you'll probably find that on your list so and then I think you guys already figured out that each block is 100 square feet so I figured that out so so we've got we think we've got five trees but if we replace that that would be 4,000 so that's almost we're up to almost 50% of our budget super oh but you know if we get a small plant a smaller tree then it's much more affordable because they'll habituate themselves to their new spot better so let's go with smaller trees okay I'll do two columns the contractor the rain garden will do ourselves that's easy I'm going to write down both costs just because all right we're through the exercise and then Teresa and Brucey are going to kindly describe how they got to their plan and how many points they got and how much it cost for that I'm going to move around behind between them so we can be pointing so we used a strategy of how could we get the most sustainability points for the least money and we began at the top of the list the invasive tree removal because we saw that we had five invasive trees to remove including Tree of Heaven Black Locust and Russian Olive so then we said we can do this ourselves we were very optimistic that these were not very large mature trees and next we went to the invasive shrub removal we counted eleven of those Asiatic Bittersweet which is actually a vine but we included it as a shrub Barberry Burnin' Bush Japanese Honey Suckle and we took those out ourselves next we started thinking about replacement and we figured replacing trees with ones that we could plant ourselves would be ideal so we put in five new trees ourselves I guess we went for the shade trees then and of course we picked ones that would do the most good for pollinators I added that but next we did our eleven new native shrubs also planting those ourselves then we looked on the far over here on this other side of the yard where there's soggy ground and erosion that's a pretty good space and it's right near the driveway so what we did there was we said okay we're going to put in a rain garden in about two thirds of that space and deal with the erosion at the far end from the street finally we had some money left over and we said we're going to start in on that broken up asphalt pavement and we're going to replace as much as our remaining budget will allow and that turned out to be 267 square feet and we put that we had a contractor do that at $15 a square foot it was the one thing we decided we just could not handle ourselves and for that we came up with a total price of $14,980 and total points $2,609 alright nice job