Fall Highlights: planted garlic, onion, and cover crops (winter rye, hairy vetch, and peas) on the garden expansion. final harvest tomato and peppers, moved some herbs inside. Eating lots of arugula, onion tops, and a few spinach leaves.

Bought heavily discounted trees at Lowes (had to return a Cleveland Pear, its invasive), killed more lawn (prairie expansion), and moved smaller trees around. Now that I'm into natives I've found it very difficult to buy plants at big box stores. Its like having food allergies.

On the watershed front, I got a grant for water evaluation test equipment. I plan to use this stuff to measure water quality in my retention pond, my local adopted river, and with my son's boy scout group on spring field trips.

Winter Plans: attempt to cold frame my spinach and take hardwood cuttings on my native shrubs. taking an 8 week backyard conservation class through Indiana Wildlife Federation and a watershed class through Purdue. Lots of pruning and may remove a few of my junky ash trees. Going to draw some plans on a rather ambitious spring garden upgrade.

Spring plans: Seed the back hill with native grasses and flowers, expand the prairie to encircle the vegetable garden, overseed my remaining lawn areas with drought tolerant fescue, put in lots of native trees, and plant a small vinyard. 

Hoosier River Watch is an all volunteer stream monitoring program. Participants take an 8 hour training session on stream assessment and water evaluation. Graduates are asked to adopt a 200 foot length of river and periodically sample and record water quality data into their shared database.

My evaluation site is a stream that drains into our marina on Geist Reservoir. (more)