Why Test Your Well Water?
Safe drinking water is important to your health. Testing your private well's water quality on a regular basis is necessary to maintain a safe and reliable source of drinking water. As an individual water system owner, it is up to you to make sure that your water is safe to consume. Unfortunately, there is no single test that tells you if water is safe. There are many waterborne contaminants that can cause illnesses if enough are present in your water. Unless a specific contam
Winterizing your rain barrel
Now that its getting cold out and your garden is going dormant, it's time to winterize your rain barrel. You don't want the water in it to freeze and expand! Start by draining your rain barrel. Be careful as a full rain barrel is heavy, a gallon of water weighs more than 8 lbs., so a full rain barrel can weigh over 400 lbs. Disconnect it from your downspout, so that it can't fill and freeze. If your downspout convertor leaves a hole when disconnected, attach the winter cap to
Watershed Planning in Butler County
Watersheds are considered an area of land that drains into a common body of water. They can be as small as your property draining into a ditch or as large as the Ohio River basin. No matter the size, we all live, play, and work in a watershed and should realize the impact we can have on the water quality downstream based on our activities. We all live downstream from others. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in charge regulating certain discharges, polluted ru
Plastic Water
A recent National Geographic article had a great quote: "If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to...
Why is my creek a strange color?
We are taught growing up that water is blue, but some rivers are black, brown, emerald blue, green, or even blue-green. So what gives these rivers their colors? First we need to understand what color is. Natural light is actually made up of a number of different colors associated with different wave lengths within the light spectrum. Think of the multiple colors of light when refracted by a prism. The color we associate with anything is the range of light waves that is refle
