5/1/2008 9:25:00 PM
Manzanita Village residents install rainwater catchment system to improve environment
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The Daily Courier/Doug Cook
Manzanita Village residents and other volunteers on Sunday build a new forest garden next to the community’s common house off Benjamin Drive. In the coming months, a rainwater catchment system will feed water to the garden’s trees and plants for nourishment.
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The Daily Courier/Doug Cook
MacRae Nicoll, left, of High Desert Rain Catchment, shows how a leaf filter attaches to a long plastic pipe that will tie into a corrugated metal pipe culvert to divert rainwater. Crystal Frost, water resource specialist with the Arizona Department of Water Resources, holds up the pipe as he speaks.
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PRESCOTT - With the assistance of a state-sponsored Urban Forest grant and local professionals, Manzanita Village co-housing community residents this past weekend began installing a rainwater catchment cistern next to their common house that will help conserve groundwater while improving the health of nearby plants and trees.
Whatever rainwater flows off the common house's roof and into its gutters will go directly into a corrugated metal pipe culvert, where the water is stored and then siphoned to a new forest garden.
Villagers also can fill small buckets directly from a spigot attached to the cistern to water the vegetation around their 1,200 to 2,000-square-foot homes.
"Enough water comes off any suburban roof to support a suburban lawn, even with a drought," said Mary Ann Clark, assistant coordinator of the cistern project who lives in Manzanita Village.
Residents of the 12-acre, 30-plus home village, located off Benjamin Drive about 1-1/2 miles from downtown Prescott, installed the cistern in advance of the summer monsoons. In the fall, they plan to put in another one so both canisters can collect the winter rain.
"In Prescott, we get a lot of water, but we get it at the wrong time of the year for plants," Clark said. "So, we're collecting the water when it's here and then have it available for when we need it."
The village - which dedicates just four of its acres to housing - has a variety of native trees, including alligator juniper, Utah juniper, piñon pine and scrub live oak. These trees, already growing on the landscape, and the forest garden that residents and others built over the weekend will benefit secondarily from the increased water penetration and seepage of the catchment system.
"By slowing down the water and watering the garden, it will percolate down into the ground and go underground to slowly water the trees, and enhance the forest ravine," Clark said. "We're grabbing rain and snow, and we're using it to water our landscape instead of using city water, which is becoming more valuable and rare. About 50 percent of the water use in Prescott is for landscaping."
The forest garden, which stands at the base of the common house, will receive water directly from a pipe extending out of the cistern and down a gently sloping hill.
This garden has three trees, including an Arizona ash and a pair of apple trees, as well as various kinds of shrubs, vines and flowers.
Residents selected plants for the garden that are edible, native to the Southwest, hardy in the extreme heat and cold of the high desert, and considerate of the community's space needs.
"Our community was designed to be water sensitive," Clark said. "There's a lot of infrastructure to collect water, but now we're finally getting to the place where we can do some of that."
This past weekend, volunteer crews dug four trenches and filled them with mulch/tree mix, planting mix and wood chips before planting the vegetation.
Villagers say the main purpose of their project is to help Prescott-area residents learn how to install cisterns and a permaculture forest garden ecosystem.
"If you go out into the forest, it isn't just trees," Clark said. "It's trees and bushes and undergrowth. We're replicating that."
Prescott-based architect Matt Zucker founded Manzanita Village in the mid-1990s with the intention that its residents would serve as good stewards of their economic, ecological and human resources.
For example, the community limits vehicular traffic on its main road to make the environment safe for children and to promote walking. To achieve this goal, residents park their vehicles in a paved common lot that sits on the side of a hill above the village.
It also has a community garden and a separate compost area.
"We take our kitchen vegetable scraps to that compost site, and we create our own good soil," Zucker said.
Zucker also designed the unique community's modern-looking homes to encourage porch sitting and other simple sociable behaviors among neighbors.
"In many ways, we represent a group of like-minded individuals who have ideas about sustainability and livelihood and put them into practice," said Carol Lee Sowards, project coordinator and Manzanita Village resident.
Contact the reporter at dcook@prescottaz.com
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Posted: Saturday, May 03, 2008
Article comment by:
z
doug,
Very nice article. My name, for future reference is Jeff Zucker.
Posted: Friday, May 02, 2008
Article comment by:
Art Gorski
You can find out more about Manzanita Village at http://www.manzanitavillage.com/.
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