Although Sustainable Woodstock’s Community Garden occupies a peaceful space on Old River Road, the location has been damaged by flood events in recent years. Now, the organization is working on a solution. The forward-thinking project will protect the remaining streambank while restoring a favorable habitat for fish and wildlife.
“Barnard Brook’s streambank has eroded over the years, notably during Tropical Storm Irene,” Sustainable Woodstock’s Executive Director, Jenevra Wetmore, shared via the organization’s website. “July 2023 flooding also caused a massive amount of erosion — we lost approximately 10 feet of bank just in that one storm. Last year, this bank erosion finally reached the community garden itself and began to destroy the plots Sustainable Woodstock used to grow food for the Woodstock Community Food Shelf, as well as individual plots rented by community members. We decided to abandon this section of the garden, losing about one-third of our growing space as a result.”
To combat the erosion, Sustainable Woodstock has enlisted Matt Murawski, an engineer with Ripple Natural Resources. “The traditional way to stop a streambank from moving is to put down rocks,” Murawski continued. “We’re doing something different; we’re taking a softer approach that may have some better habitat value. Instead of using rocks, we’re using large root wads. We’ll take a tree that is 12 to 18 inches in diameter, pull it out of the ground with the whole root wad intact, and we line the channel.” The trees used will be about 16 feet long, and the root wads will be about five feet in diameter.
Considering the potential advantages of this approach, Murawski added, “The water will flow down the river and will encounter all this wood, which will cause some local scour, so you’ll get some holes that provide cover for fish. Habitat is created when it works well. Then we’re planting on the upper bank because the idea is that the root wads won’t last forever, but they will last long enough that we’ll get some robust vegetation on the bank. When those root wads are finally gone, we have healthy, deep-rooted trees in place.”
The plan is innovative, but it is also somewhat experimental. “There aren’t many examples of installations of wood on rivers in Vermont, probably a half dozen at most,” Murawski recalled.
Sustainable Woodstock hopes to complete the project sometime this fall, but Murawski said it may not happen until next year due to some important pieces that have yet to fall into place.
According to Marie Levesque Caduto, a Watershed Coordinator for the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, there was some opposition to the project based on the physical needs and concerns over funding. “We couldn’t get 50 feet, which is what is generally required, from the edge of the bank. We can’t do that because of the garden. There was a lot of pushback on funding this project, but we know the bridge would fail eventually if we didn’t do it.”
Wetmore said the bulk of the funding is being provided by the Water Infrastructure Sponsorship Program (WISPr).
For more on this, please see our July 10 edition of the Vermont Standard.
