For our Earth Month activities, we encouraged people to share their ocean-friendly practices with us. Now, we’re asking Maui residents to share their friends and neighbors’ ocean-friendliness with us! For some inspiration, check out what West Maui hotels and resorts have done. You can do a bunch of those things on your own property, like redirecting a downspout to water a garden, or installing some permeable pavers to promote infiltration. That helps our groundwater health and could mean more water in streams, less in storm drains. If you’ve seen anyone doing that, show us! Has anyone you know installed some drip irrigation or a fancy timer system connected to weather reports? Put in a rain garden? We want to know about it! Here’s how to participate: get out there are “bust” your friends and neighbors being ocean friendly with their properties by snapping a photo (*safely socially-distanced of course), send us the photo (*with their permission of course), and if you can, post it on your own social media as well using #OceanFriendlyMaui. Include your mailing address when you email us so we can send you a gift card (if you’re a Maui resident). We’ll share it on our pages and website to highlight the positive action people are taking. Doing some yard or garden renovation during the stay at home orders? Make it ocean-friendly!4/17/2020
If you’ve been following our series of “quarantine-friendly” Earth Month activities , you might already be working on a Victory Garden, or have plans to start one. Or, you might be ambitious enough to consider some more extensive yard and garden renovations. If this is the case, we have some tips for you to build in some ocean-friendly practices. And as a BONUS, the first four Maui households who send us a photo of themselves with their yard or garden renovation project (that we can share on our website & social media) will receive $25 gift certificates to Ace Hardware in Lahaina, to help you get the supplies you need! Details below. Tip #1. Change up your irrigation. Save water, money, and time. Consider switching to drip irrigation, or get a newfangled timer that links to the weather, these save water too. Tip #2. Install a rain garden. Whether a spot in your yard that floods, or the place you always wash down your boards, a rain garden is a beautiful way to help with infiltration. More information can be found here, and via this fantastic Hawaii Residential Rain Garden Manual. Tip #3. Install some LIDs. “LID” = Low Impact Design, which is a more sustainable way of managing stormwater runoff in the built environment. While some LIDs are more extensive forms of infrastructure requiring complicated architectural design, a lot are simple and low-cost, such as redirecting a downspout, putting in semi-permeable pavers, or doing some erosion-control by planting on a slope. Definitely something you can do at home! For examples of these, check out some we spotted in Honokowai. Tip #4 Plant pono. Put in or swap out for some native plants and/or drought-tolerant species. They will use less water and be more appropriate for the landscape. Gift card giveaway details: As noted, we have several Ace Lahaina gift cards to give away on a first-come, first-serve basis to Maui residents, just email us a photo of you with your project (feel free to share it on your own social media too, using #MauiEarthMonth2020) and include the name of the person who will be going in to Ace Lahaina to pick it up and do the shopping. Ace has special hours at the moment (8 am - 5 pm) and is limiting shoppers' access to 10 at a time. This week we co-coordinated a workshop for West Maui property managers all about dealing with stormwater, including Low Impact Design, "Good Housekeeping," and other Best Management Practices. The workshop included a tour of West Maui facilities for an insider look into some novel projects and approaches currently being implemented in West Maui. Check out this photo album on Facebook with detailed captions of our site visits, and the presentations we shared. The slides in this album were prepared and presented by Lauren Roth Venu of Roth Ecological Design Int. LLC. Project partners included West Maui Ridge to Reef Initiative, the West Maui Kumuwai campaign, Coral Reef Alliance, and Project S.E.A.-Link. Mahalo to project sponsors the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, Division of Aquatic Resources, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and the US Fish & Wildlife Service. Another big mahalo to all those who attended and are putting these strategies into practice at their properties! There are many things that can be done at a property level to reduce polluted runoff, from easy and small-scale to more involved. However, they may not always be recognizable if you don't know what to look for. The good news is that there are already a lot of great practices already in place within the condominium properties in Honokowai we're aiming to work with, so we put together a gallery to showcase some of of the examples we've encountered. (To display the captions for each photo, hover your cursor over the image) |
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