Just Flood It!
April 2nd, 2019
Playing in the dirt started at an early age for me and it must have given my parents hours of freedom from my hyperactivity in the house. One summer they placed a large sand pile along the side of our woods in the back yard. Looking back it must have been a horrible visual site. But it was down a slight incline, so truly you could not see it from Mom’s patio garden.
The sand pile soon became the sand pit, as I leveled it out and beat it down for all my GI Joe and Transformers to do battle. The compaction of the sand pile in to the sand pit lead to the next best discovery. It holds water! While it was an accident in how I discovered this miracle, nonetheless, it clearly shaped my life. I left the hose running one summer day near the sand pit and magically it filled the pit. The pit was now a diverse complex of flooded land with pools, ponds, back water and flowing streams. Amazing! This was only the beginning of the various land formations I made in building all those swamps in the sand pit. Little did I know, that one day I would build these wetlands on large expansions of land.
Those summer days in the “sand pit swamps” clearly fueled a passion today for creating wetland habitats. I was fortunate to work for Ducks Unlimited for nearly ten years where I learned from some of the best wetland biologists in how to design, construct and manage wetland habitats. I worked both for Ducks Unlimited and then later as a private consultant building wetlands and waterfowl habitat throughout the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Working across the 5 state watershed, clearly informs my business with Land Group today. This summer I will build several of these swamps, wetlands, duck ponds, frog ponds, impoundments, call it what ever you like at Ridge Farm in Somerset County. Ridge Farm is farm I own with some buddies and I have designed a conservation plan to create and or restore over 20 acres of wetland habitat. Using a few different techniques, Ridge Farm will have both managed and naturally restored wetland habitats constructed in the Summer of 2019. As one of my close colleagues says “Just Flood It”
Stay tuned, much more to come!
