Bittersweet park. Greeley, Colorado. Photo by D. Sillman
(Click on the link to listen to an audio version of this blog … A walk around bittersweet part part 1
This is our second winter in Colorado. Last year we noticed that winter weather comes in bursts through the season: there are often two weeks of cold and snow and ice, and then a week or two of increasingly mild, sunny days (with still astoundingly cold nights!) followed by a return to deep winter conditions. The regularly occurring, mild weather periods, though, have allowed me to go out bike riding every month that we have lived here!
We had gotten quite used a very different winter-weather pattern over the 34 years we lived in Pennsylvania. In PA when winter arrived (which could be anytime from November to January), it stayed! There might be a day or two here and there of warm temperatures and sunshine, but most of the season was cloudy, rainy, snowy and cold with daytime high temperatures that might differ from the nighttime lows by only a degree or two! Once winter settled in, that was it! The bike trails iced over and you had to wait until there was a determined March thaw to be able to go out for a ride!
It is very important for all of us wintering here in Colorado to take advantage of the breaks in the cold weather, and a couple of Saturdays ago, back in the middle of February, that is just what we did! The whole family (Marian, Lee, Ari, Deborah and I) went for a walk around nearby Bittersweet Park. Saturday and Sunday were both forecasted to be in the 50’s with lots of sun. By the next Tuesday, though, the high was only going to be 8 degrees and the low was expected to be -10! We wanted to get some sunshine and fresh air while we could!
Photo by D. Sillman
The first thing we noticed when we got out of our car at the park was a very large sign that said “No Dogs Allowed.” The second thing we noticed was that almost everyone walking around the park had their dogs with them! Those two observations say an awful lot about Colorado. Post a ridiculous rule and it will be universally ignored! As Amor Towels put it in his wonderful novel The Lincoln Highway:
“For most people, Emmett figured, rules were a necessary evil. They had to be abided for having the privilege of living in an orderly world. And that’s why most people, when left to their own devices, were willing to stretch the boundaries of a rule. To speed on an empty road or liberate an apple from an untended orchard.”
Or take their dogs to a “no dogs allowed” park! Every dog we met was happy and friendly, and every owner was carrying some bags for “waste” collection! Even a standard poodle, who really did not want mingle with mere humans, gave in to a friendly head scratch and almost made eye contact with us!
Photo by D. Sillman
Bittersweet Park is a large, 60 acre, mostly flat rectangle bordered on three sides by quiet, residential streets. The southern third of the park is grass and the central and northern thirds are dominated by a large lake that is surrounded by a ring of grass. The grass areas make up about half of the park (31.5 acres, to be exact) and the lake makes up the rest (28.5 acres). There are concrete sidewalks and dirt paths that wind throughout the park. A loop that goes around the lake is 1.2 miles long, and that is the one we struck out on!
Two years ago the city of Greeley decided to reimagine this park. Originally, its 31.5 acres of grass were all Kentucky bluegrass. This grass species, as we have mentioned before, is an incredibly common component of most “lawns” all across North America. “Kentucky” bluegrass, though, is not actually from Kentucky. It is an introduced plant native to Europe, Asia, and northern Africa and is classified as invasive and destructive in most natural grasslands. Also, bluegrass is incredibly water demanding. According to the Colorado State Extension service, a bluegrass lawn requires 2.5 inches of water a week in order to survive! Over the five, “Colorado summer” months (May through September) that would mean that a bluegrass lawn would consume 55 inches of water! That represents almost 400% of the average annual rainfall here in northern Colorado (See Signs of Summer 13, August 27, 2020)!
Buffalo grass at Bittersweet. Photo by D. Sillman
In 2018, the bluegrass expanses of Bittersweet Park required 20.8 million gallons of water in order to stay alive and green. This is enough water to service the basic water needs of 706 households here in Greeley. The cost of this water was over $110,000.00, and, in addition, the park also had grass-related expenditures for the energy, machinery and wages required to mow and maintain the water-stimulated grasses and also to fertilize and weed the grassy expanses. Bittersweet Park was an incredibly expensive component of the Greeley city-scape!
In 2020, with the help of a $1.6 million grant, the city of Greeley began changing the nature of Bittersweet Park. Twenty-one of the 31.5 acres of bluegrass were replaced with native grass species (13.37 acres of buffalo grass) and 6.97 acres of a mix of taller, native grass species. A total of 15 native grass varieties were added to the former, bluegrass monoculture. The key idea of this conversion was to create a grass ecosystem that required much less water and also much less intense maintenance and care. The city of Greeley was doing on a larger scale exactly what Deborah and I did last year to our front yard: create a sustainable, shortgrass prairie ecosystem (see Signs of Summer 8, July 29, 2021).
Geese on lake at Bittersweet Park. Photo by D. Sillman
By the spring/summer of 2021, the Bittersweet Park “prairie” was growing well. About 75% of the native planting areas had good grass coverage, and their bare patches were subsequently filled in with a June 2021 re-seeding. Weeds had been growing extensively throughout the cleared and seeded areas and were being dealt with via herbicide applications and physical removal. Deborah and I had also experienced the explosion of weeds when we removed the bluegrass turf from our front yard. Weed seeds of many types steadily accumulate in grass ecosystems and can sit for decades waiting for a sun, water or space opportunity to grow (see Signs of Summer 9, August 5, 2021).
It was estimated that over the second year of the Bittersweet Park grass conversion project, 9 million gallons of water had been saved (a $48,000 savings!) along with $3000 savings in fuel costs and $5000 savings in fertilizer costs. So, after one year, the conversion to native grasses saved the city almost $60,000! The savings are expected to increase as the grass ecosystems becomes more established and stable.
The native grasses, even in their dry, winter state, looked great. The buffalo grass stems have folded down over themselves to make a rolling surface of regularly shaped domes. There is room under these domes for invertebrates and probably even some small vertebrates to find shelter from the cold. These grass dwellers can come up onto the dome surfaces during the warm, sunny days and then drop back into their sheltered spaces at night. We saw, much to Ari’s great joy, armies of tiny, black spiders (Pardosa spp.) racing around on the top of the buffalo grass. There have been reports in the park of increased numbers of rabbits (who could easily be denning up under the grass domes) and even foxes (who might be there hunting the rabbits!).
(This walk around Bittersweet Park will continue next week!)
Wonderful story!