sustainable spirituality

I love the way the tin man and sculpture look in the light of the snow.

Today it started snowing. So I went to the garden and took some pictures

Next to the water garden is a sustainable classroom. All the rain water is suppose to go into the garden. You can see where it was flooding the field to release it I dug a channel through the gravel( low tech).

The past few days the temperature was around 20 degrees. I went over to the garden and took these pictures. Notice the ice on the pond and the flow forms.

We use 3 flow forms in the water garden to filter and oxygenate the pond. A flow form allows the water to spin in a figure eight patern similar to the meandering of a stream. The power for our flow form comes from our solar panels.

The water garden uses some electricity in the opperation of pumps for the pond and living machine. The solar panel in the garden is a six panel 1 kilowatt system. It is mounted on a pole and rotates to folllow the sun. It use no power except the heat of the sun to shift the weight of gas filled pontoons.

Last week I came to the watergarden to discover that students and Mr. Heigelke had been working all day cutting back the summer growth. After a summer of growth it realy needed a trimming. The flowering currant was trimmed to shoulder height. This will allow the plants to flower early in February. Arround the pond the purple asters and lupin were cut to the ground. This will give them a robust growth in the spring. the area around the Oregon Oak was cleared of service berry and lupin. You can now see the famous davinci totem pole. It is a ceramic piece created by former art teacher Anna Quin and the davinci students. The living machine is doing very well. It consists of 5 - 55 gallon drums filled with water and plants. They are fed liquid waste from the cafeteria every week. This nutient rich liquid is digested by the plants ,fish and snails in the tanks. Notice the size of the leaves in the closest tank. these are wapato and are three times the size of the wapato in the pond

This is a view of the eastern end of the pond . The lilly pads are turning yellow . This pond is fed rain water from the near by portable classrooms. We estimate that 750,000 gallons of rain water will flow into the pond annually.

Ten years ago I was teaching science at an arts middle school called DaVinci. The school is located in Portland Oregon where there is no shortage of rain. The students and I began to wonder what we could do with all the rain water that came off of our school. We noticed that there was a piece of dead ground that had once been a tennis court and it was located near several portable classrooms. From there we began a journey of designing and building a water garden that today is know as the Davinci Water Garden. I am now retired after 36 years of teaching but I still love the excitement of discovery. When I was teaching everyday I seldom had time to observe and reflect on this wonderful space called the water garden. So the purpose of this blog is to share with people the wonderful changes that natures provides in a small space in an urban setting. I will be posting pictures and observations of how the garden changes through out the seasons. I hope that others might see this and want t