Working The Big Dark
During these days of long nights and short days, a landowner’s projects around the property usually dwindle, thankfully. But they don’t stop. The Big Dark brings one important chore and one good opportunity.
The big chore is managing stormwater. The term loosely applies to any water resulting from heavy rain or snow that moves across the landscape as a single force. It can be as little as the accumulated rain from a building’s roof or as much as the cumulative runoff from roads.
Stormwater can have damaging impacts to your property. Its force can cause erosion on hillsides, undercut building foundations, and deposit mud in your or your neighbors’ yards or fields. It also can pick up chemicals from places like parking areas and spread them onto these same areas.
Later in its destructive course, this polluted water can run into Island streams, eroding banks and killing aquatic organisms, including fish such as salmon. The destruction continues once it reaches Puget Sound, a body of water struggling enough already with industrial and transportation pollutants
Let’s not even think about the effects of unmanaged stormwater on septic drainfields. Or let’s do, since, if drainfields get flooded, they can fail, possibly causing water to back up into your home. When this flooding eventually moves along, it carries the graywater from your drainfield with it—another source of pollution to fields and streams.
On a brighter side, winter brings the opportunity—perhaps a counterintuitive one—to plant native trees and woody shrubs.
Many landowners assume that the best time to plant natives is in the spring, when temperatures rise and plants begin to grow. But that’s precisely the problem with spring planting: You’re asking a lot of a plant if you expect it to establish itself in the soil while, at the same time, starting top growth, and when warm temps cause evaporation from tender new leaves.
If you plant in the winter instead, a plant’s roots have time to establish themselves and even, in some cases, begin to grow in their new spots. By the time spring arrives, these roots have sufficient connection to the soil to support top growth and move moisture upwards to offset evaporation.
This last point about the importance of moisture can’t be overstated. The PNW’s summers are droughty, and getting droughtier. By winter, rains have returned enough moisture to the soils that winter-planted trees and shrub have the maximum time to establish themselves before the drought returns.
Care should be taken, though, to avoid planting on days when freezing temps are imminent, since the loosening of soil during planting allows any oncoming frost to creep into the loosened material and freeze roots, killing the plant. A few weeks without frost is all the time the soil needs to settle after planting and for soils to knit together, protecting roots from any frost damage.
