Taking Care of Business

Cleaning Up the Creek Bed

Last week we received notice that the county was planning to come in this month to do the cleaning out of the creek (or as they like to call it, the “drain”). As you can see in the pictures, we’re in a dry period and there’s currently no water in it. Included in the plan was to take down trees and plants all along one side so they could get their equipment in.

As you all know, we are a botanical sanctuary (among other things), so we were quite concerned for the destruction being proposed. Some of the trees we’ve been concerned about include a huge old sycamore, a mature burr oak and walnut tree, one of our only swamp oaks, and an extremely large old red oak. Other plantings include a massive beloved button bush which attracts countless pollinators, and several blue flag iris’s.

The removal of trees not only would destroy valuable ecosystem assets, but would also remove the work they do of erosion control along the creek banks. Even simply running over the roots of the trees with large equipment could damage them to the point of dying later, if it didn’t kill them immediately. So it made no sense even from the standpoint of what the county is trying to accomplish to take away the erosion control. Because of this (as well as other reasons which I won’t go into now), Brennah and I attended the public meetings that were held in advance to voice our dissent. Nevertheless, the county decided to go ahead with the project.

So last week I made several calls to the Drain Commission office and was able to schedule to have one of the engineers come out to the Sanctuary this Wednesday (tomorrow as of this writing). He will walk the creek with me to hear about the particular trees and plants we are most concerned about. But meanwhile, Dan and Brennah spent all of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday clearing out the creek themselves. With the help of a chainsaw and loppers, they cleared out all the dead fallen wood and brush in the creek bed, so now we are hoping that when the engineer comes he will find that they have no need at all of doing work on our section of the county “drain”.

For those of you who don’t know, we call it by its proper name which is The North Branch of the Swan Creek. Our tiny creek runs all the way out to Lake Erie, and the trees on our property help to clean and filter the water as it goes on its way. Sadly, we’ve been unsuccessful in our efforts to stop the project as a whole, and many trees will be destroyed in the three counties where the work is being done. (The engineer was even proudly telling me about beaver dams they have been destroying). However, we are doing our best to keep them out of our little stretch.

New Website

For those of you who are paid subscribers, I would also like to give you a little sneak peak of the new website that we are working on. It is still very much under construction, but you may enjoy seeing the progress so far. It does not yet work on mobile devices, so you’ll need to look at it on a computer to see it properly.

We plan on it being more interactive then the current site, and I’m very excited about having it to be a place where people can see better what we’re all about and be able to connect better with us! You can view it here.

Thank you as always for your support and for being a part of our community. ♥️

By Star and by Stone, may God’s blessings always be upon you,

Jean