SOQUE BULLETIN
January 28, 2011
6 inches of snow fall on January 8th = a great day for canoeing right?
(Soque River 1/8 mile south of Pitts Park)
1) Tour of Sustainable Streambanks this Saturday
2) SRWA Winter Campaign …..and signage campaign
3) Greenhouse Moving each Monday this winter…til we're done!
4) Willow Stake Harvesting - February 12th
5) Video on Hall County Restoration work
1) Tour of Sustainable Streambanks this Saturday
If your still looking for something fun to do this weekend come join us for our latest sustainability tour this Saturday. Problems with eroding streambanks are by far the most common problem we hear about from people who own streamside property. Come learn some basics of why many streams erode and what we can do to improve eroding banks when they occur. The Gainesville Times gave us some great pre-event coverage so we thought we'd just run their article to tell you what the tour's all about.
Tour of sustainable stream banks
When: 10 a.m. - 2 pm-ish Saturday
Where: Starting at Old Clarkesville Mill, 385 Grant St., off U.S. 441
To register: send an e-mail to soque@windstream.net for head count for food or just show up / there should be room
Lunch will be at the Country Crossroads Café (so no need to pack one)
Where: Starting at Old Clarkesville Mill, 385 Grant St., off U.S. 441
To register: send an e-mail to soque@windstream.net for head count for food or just show up / there should be room
Lunch will be at the Country Crossroads Café (so no need to pack one)
The oldest Natural Channel Design project in the state of Georgia will be featured on the tour.
Tour to teach about streams
Participants will learn how to protect and restore banks
Tricia L. Nadolny- The Gainesville Times
January 26, 2011
On Saturday, Justin Ellis will try to patch what he sees as a disconnect between land owners and the natural world around them.
Ellis, director of the Soque River Watershed Association, will lead about 50 people on a tour of Northeast Georgia stream banks with a goal of teaching how to best protect crumbling shores.
"There's a disconnect between people's understanding of ... stream properties in general, just how streams are designed to change shape through time," he said. "It's important for all of us to have a basic understanding of how that happens so that we can allow the river to work and change."
Ellis will teach participants about natural channel design stream bank restoration, an approach developed in the last 15 years.
"For the last 50 years or so our approach to handling stream banks was to straighten them, (and) if you did have erosion problems to use lots and lots of stone to try to armor the banks and very little vegetation," he said.
The natural channel design embraces a stream's natural and untouched state and tries to restore eroding banks to that condition.
Attendees on Saturday's tour will visit five stream banks. The first is a site where a future natural restoration project is planned. There, the group can view an actively eroding stream bank, Ellis said.
The last site will be where the first natural restoration project in Georgia was implemented in 1998.
One site will also show the group a natural and untouched stream bank, Ellis said, which will hopefully show them what restoration projects should aim for.
There is space on the tour for 50 people and Ellis said he will take reservations through Friday. He said the tour is not just valuable for those living on the Soque River but on any stream in Georgia.
Ellis said it's been difficult for property owners to know on their own how to handle crumbling stream banks, and he would like to see communities take a more proactive approach to education about the issue.
"We can't expect people to just know how streams function," he said. "We have to be teaching each other."
2) SRWA Winter Campaign
Help the Soque River Lover paddle his way towards our $4,000 WINTER CAMPAIGN GOAL!
The SRWA would like to ask for your help in our WINTER CAMPAIGN goals, so that come spring we have the financial means to accomplish all the great programs we have planned in 2011. From January 1 - April 1 we'd love your help in meeting one or all of the following goals.
· Gain 50 new members - we'd love to add 20 new businesses and 30 new individual and family members by April 1. If you're not a member but have been watching us and like what we're doing, now is the perfect time to join.
· Gain 50 renewals - if you've been a member before in the SRWA now is a great time to rejoin. We'd love to renew all our relationships in the community.
· $1,000 in donations from existing members - Please consider a special gift in 2011. We have a very special project in particular that we'd like to do in early spring but it will require some special donations from our membership. See below.
· Add 150 new e-mails to our Soque Bulletin - We had a small setback last week with the theft of a computer so we lost many new e-mails we'd recently acquired for our Soque Bulletin list. Help us more than make-up for this by forwarding our Bulletin to a friend, (especially if you'd done this recently please do it one more time to make sure we get them back) or sending us their name and we'll contact them.
· TOTAL of $4,000 by April 1 - All these efforts together will start the year out right with $4,000 of new income towards new projects.
We really want everyone to know that your support is what makes it possible for us to build "ON THE GROUND" community projects. In 2010 over 50% of our operating budget came from LOCAL SOURCES of support. That's incredible, and it's the secret to our success. And here's a quick glance back at 2010 at what we were able to accomplish with your help.
- Constructed a 1/5 acre organic community garden on the Clarkesville Greenway
- Installed 15+ cattle exclusion projects protecting 25,000 ft of streams
- Constructed a 400 sq ft model rain garden in partnership with North Georgia Tech
- Hosted sustainability tours of Grist Mills, Sustainable Farms, and a Bike Tour of the Greenway for over 100 attendees
- Assisted Tallulah Falls in installing rainbarrels on over 1/2 of all residential homes
- Installed a 1,000 gallon cistern at Fairview Elementary for use in outdoor irrigation
- Launched an online farmers market that generated $27,000 income for local farms so far
- Designed a streambank restoration project for construction this spring
- Partnered with our Board of Education to re-vegetate a school site for erosion control and stormwater infiltration.
And that's just our short list!.But to give this WINTER CAMPAIGN a specific focus we wanted to target one very simple project. If we meet our goal, we've partnered with Habersham County to install Stream Crossing Signs at every bridge crossing that we'd like folks to know the name of the stream that flows beneath. This is a great public awareness campaign and any individual or business members that wants to give a donation specifially to this cause will get some permanent credit on our new website that we're building. We want to show thanks to those that support specific projects.
Imgaine stream signs like this one on every bridge in the Soque Basin
To demonstrate that we believe in our projects as much as you do, the staff and board are setting their own giving goals for this campaign, starting with the first $100 donated by the Executive Director. Please help us paddle our SOQUE RIVER LOVER boat upstream to our goal and make a new membership gift or donation TODAY. There's a giving form attached to this e-mail as a PDF. It has 3 membership forms on it so when you print it out, give the other two to someone else. If you'd like to make a donation towards the River Signage Project just write SIGNAGE DONATION on the card and the total enclosed. Businesses will be contacted for their logos to include in promotional materials. And HUGE THANKS for supporting us!
3) Greenhouse Moving each Monday this winter …til we're done!
We've got a ton of volunteer projects coming up during Winter and Spring and the Greenhouse project is one of the most exciting. We've had an unused 30x16 greenhouse at North Georgia Technical College for over 2 years, when a couple of months ago we realized something. If we move it to the Greenway Community Garden, this greenhouse could be a great resource for growing organic starter plants, rain garden plants, and plant for streamside plantings and for restoration.
Well, that's what we're gonna do starting this Monday, January 31st from 10am til about 2pm we're gonna start to dismantle our current greenhouse to move and reassemble on the greenway. We need all the volunteer power we can muster so if you're free any Monday for the next few weeks, if the weather is good we're gonna be working on it. It's also a great opportunity to learn something about greenhouse construction if your interested in the farming crafts! If you're able to help just show up at North Georgia Technical College and drive around back to their greenhouses. Ours is hidden behind a small brick building. Bring a wrench if you've got one. E-mail if you need more info soque@windstream.net
We lost the photos of the actual greenhouse we're gonna move, but this one has the exact same design and dimensions 30x16
Only we'll have doors on both ends.
4) Willow Stake Harvesting - February 12th
The next volunteer project on the horizon is the harvesting of willow stakes from Habersham Mills Lake two weeks from now on Saturday, February 12th. We'll probably meet at Clarkesville Mill again around 10am. This project will use these stakes for streambank restoration projects throughout the watershed. We'll send another e-mail with details soon.
5) Video on Hall County Restoration work
Just click on the image to watch the video
In preparation for our Tour of Sustainable Streambanks this weekend we've been reaching out to all our partners collecting their information and experiences in streambank restoration. Fortunately, our colleagues at the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeepers recently completed another great video documenting the restoration of Hall County's West Fork of the Little River (a tributary to the Hooch of course).
The video does a good job of explaining the basics of streambank erosion, such as chanelization, stream buffers / vegetation, and the use of rock vanes. If you want to come to the tour already properly versed then take a look, or if you just want to learn more in preparation for some of our very own streambank restoration projects coming up this year in the Soque Basin, we think you'll enjoy this video. Just click on the photo for the link.
Justin Ellis
Executive Director
Soque River Watershed Association
706-754-9382
