In addition Snohomish County has completed the re-engineering and construction of North Creek along Clearwater Reach. Click on the picture below to see a panorama of the work on the Commons portion.
Let us know if you are interested and want to have a site visit. You can meet some of the commoners, tour the site and get answers to your questions.
New York Times Permaculture Article
Construction will start on the first four new homes in late August or early September. Those of us who will be occupying those homes are excited to finally live at the Commons and have daily interactions with the land and all the plants and creatures that we will be sharing it with, as well as with each other.
Several of us are interested in permaculture and will use many of its principles as we continue to discourage invasives and encourage the growth of diverse organisms, including us humans.
Urban Bee Company, a local beekeeper that placed and maintains a thriving hive in our Seattle backyard, posted a great NY Times article about the growing interest in permaculture philosophy and practice.
Speaking of hives, I plan to get some beekeeping training from Bob Redmond at Urban Bee Company so we can have a hive at the Commons. It will be fun to learn more about this ancient farming practice.
Passive House Prototype Available for Viewing
Today I went to the official opening for the Mini-Bungalow Passive House prototype at the Phinney Neighborhood Association (PNA). It's a 300 square foot dwelling built by students at Seattle Central Community College's Wood Construction Center. The building was designed to conform to City of Seattle requirements for a "Backyard Cottage" as a Detached Accessory Dwelling Unit (DADU) on a single-family lot. It is one of the first passive homes to be built in Washington State.l By contrast, over 20,000 have been built in Germany and Austria.
It is a lovely little space and is very quiet and tight. It includes an air exchanger that captures the heat and moisture of outgoing air and warms incoming air, ensuring a continuous fresh air supply. It also has R-52 insulated walls and ceiling, R-70 insulated floors, high performance windows that allow more passive solar gain than heat loss and almost complete airtight construction.
It was fun and encouraging to see an actual livable building using high-efficiency standards. I hope this is the beginning of a much bigger trend in the U.S. It certainly needs to be.
The Mini-B house will be on display for four to six months. It will be open from 10AM to 4PM on Sunday, January 30, as part of the Home Design and Remodel Fair at PNA.
Thanksgiving Weekend Work Party and Potluck
On the weekend following Thanksgiving, several Commons members got together to do some work at our property, and then shared a delicious potluck meal. We gathered for the meal in our first common building--the shop.
A number of Commons members worked with a contractor over the summer to build our common shop. By Thanksgiving it was completely enclosed, although not yet insulated. Tom found a great wood-burning stove on craigslist, which provided warmth and cheer for our potluck and those working inside.
Our excellent wood stove
The space looked especially festive because Tom also put up some holiday lights.
Several people worked in the shop stringing electrical wire and installing electrical boxes. Special thanks to Asa, Tamara, Ben, Nathie, Arnold and Marilea, who won't be Commons residents, but who are friends and supporters. They participated in the work party and then joined us for dinner. We are so grateful for your help.
Arnold drilling holes for wire
Ben and Nathie sawing wood for the electrical project
Asa swinging a hammer
Bob and Arnold reviewing the wiring plan
Other people grubbed out blackberries near the parking lot in preparation for planting shrubs. Some of us who arrived later stayed after the meal to plant baby alders and willow stakes near the north end of the property. These trees will grow quickly in wet soil and begin to shade out the reed canary grass monoculture that has crowded out any other plant over a large part of the wetland.
We all made progress on the built and natural environment and enjoyed the time together. Plus, the food was delicious!
Nikos enjoying the shop's loft
The Complex Story of Salmon in North Creek
I was inspired by our Clearwater sockeye salmon, returning in much larger numbers this year to spawn in North Creek, to find out more about their story. I turned up information that I found surprising and fascinating. If you'd like to know more, read on.
A few weeks ago, I took a video of some salmon swimming upstream in North Creek.
Around the same time our salmon started returning (descendants of salmon that spawned in 2006), the Seattle Times published an intriguing article . From that article I learned that sockeye that swim from Puget Sound up the fish ladder at Hiram Chittenden locks in Ballard to spawn in the rivers and creeks flowing into Lake Washington are not native to that system. They are descended from sockeye planted from a Skagit River tributary in 1935 and from a temporary hatchery on the Cedar River. North Creek is part of that system, flowing into the Sammamish River, thence to Lake Washington and the ship canal and out to Puget Sound. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife website briefly describes how sockeye came to be introduced into the Lake Washington watershed.
The salmon that are native to our rivers and creeks are chinook, coho and kokanee (a freshwater sockeye relative). However, unlike juvenile sockeye that are adapted to spend a year in deep-water lakes before heading to sea, chinook and coho need to mature in rivers and streams. Native salmon species are not doing well at all because our urban lakes and streams are befouled fish habitat. As a population we are not effectively enforcing the laws we created to preserve and restore stream habitat.
More after the jump... Sockeye survive in larger numbers because they don't need to spend as much time in creeks before heading to sea. They also benefit from being reared in a hatchery. We are all spending $45 million to build a permanent sockeye hatchery on the Cedar River, then tag and track sockeye because of their value as a fishing resource. These non-native fish are not endangered, so there's little incentive or political will to clean up streams and rivers in which they spawn. Despite the fact that we're spending lots of money to preserve a non-native sockeye fishery, the returns have not been good enough most years to even open up fishing, beyond the treaty-guaranteed rights of local tribes.
For a short time, two dead salmon were easily visible near the foot bridge across North Creek. There's no way of knowing whether these two fish completed their mission successfully by laying and fertilizing eggs.
Washington Fish and Wildlife counts the sockeye that return through the Ballard locks each year. The counts since 2000 are available on their website. In 2006 a large number of sockeye returned through the locks--418,015, in fact. In 2007, only 60,117 came back. In 2008 there were 33,6259, and in 2009 only 21,718 returned. On Clearwater's section of North Creek, we did not see any sockeye during the past two years. Despite the fact that we saw more fish in our creek this year, the total return (156,752) was little more than a third of the parent population that spawned the current generation four years ago. Chinook and coho numbers are more dismal--10,565 and 3,608, respectively.
An animal dragged a dead or dying salmon onto the creek bank and left a lot of it there. This photo shows the very end of this fish's life cycle. Its flesh has become food for other creatures, including maggots. Little is left but a few thin bones.
There is one more wrinkle to this story, as I know it so far. At least one person knowledgeable about the history and practice of salmon management in the Lake Washington watershed believes that many of the fish spawning in our little local creeks are in fact native endangered kokanee, not introduced sockeye. If that were proven to be the case, it would become necessary for counties and municipalities to enforce stream habitat preservation laws. That is something various public and private interests would find at least inconvenient, and at most extremely expensive.
There is obviously more to this story and more research to be done. We know our current urban living style is not healthy for fish or the wildlife that depend on them. It is easy to feel overwhelmed and discouraged by the scope and complexity of the problem. To solve it requires consistent, informed action and a commitment to live sustainably by us, the inhabitants of the Puget Sound area. Our Commons restoration efforts may be small in the scheme of things, but I treasure being part of a community that is actively working to create better habitat for salmon, other creatures and humans.
End of post.
Native Plants
Post by Lisa Port, Commons member and landscaping expert.
At the Clearwater Commons, Low-Impact Development community, we are planting native plants in our wetland mitigation and landscaped planting beds because they tend to be hardy in cold weather, tougher and more resistant in drought conditions, and they provide a stable, suitable diet and habitat for our native birds and mammals.
Native plants are relatively easy to acquire from reputable nurseries in our region or propagated on site. They can be planted in native soils and while many homeowners are encouraged to amend their gardens with compost, native plants do very well in undisturbed native soil without special amendments or accommodations. Native plants, once given an opportunity, will overtake invasive plant species. Invasive plants create unhealthy monocultures, limiting available food and habitat for animals in the area and creating dull, uninteresting landscapes.
Ribes sanguineum, Red Flowering Currant
When planted in the fall, natives take advantage of cool, wet, fall and winter seasons to expand their root structures, digging deep into the soil to establish what will become essential root stock to weather our typical summer drought season. As with any newly planted garden, supplemental water is necessary through the first year, especially for trees and shrubs, but native plants actually thrive without special coddling or attention, and usually without supplemental water after their first year in the ground.
Salmonberry flowers
Native plants such as Mahonia provide nectar for wintering hummingbirds even in the coldest of winters. Rushes and sedges along a stream bank or seasonal pond provide essential habitat for amphibians and insects, which also provides a food source for salmon. Diversity in a native plant garden also creates a diversity of food and habitat for many of our bird, mammal and raptor species, thus supporting a diverse and healthy eco-system from the ground up.
We are excited to announce that we have started construction of four new homes! 4 units are being built with scheduled completion in the spring.
