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Land Use

In accordance with the 2006 Campus Master Plan, which declares the university’s intention to become “a model for environmental sustainability,” the outdoor landscape of the Davis Center features native plants, pedestrian and multi-use paths, and innovative ways to collect and recycle stormwater. UVM also chooses not to irrigate any plantings on campus, except on the University Green. Not to mention, the Davis Center actually added green space to UVM’s campus (the majority of the building was constructed over an old parking lot).

Get the facts on:

Landscaping

• The grounds around Davis are planted with drought-resistant grasses and shrubs that are native to Vermont. This eliminates the need to irrigate and strengthens the connection between the campus community and local nature.
• Outdoor seating, pathways, and a performance space invite people in the Davis Center to value, respect and make use of campus green space.

Green Roof

• The 18,000 square foot green roof over the loading dock is planted with 11,900 square feet of a variety of drought-resistant grasses. Around the edges, tall ornamental grasses give the roof a garden feel without the need for watering: Flame Grass (Miscanthus purpurescens), Blue Oat Grass (Helictotrichon ‘Saphirsprudel’), Red Switch Grass (Panicum virgatum ‘Rostrahlbusch’), Blue Switch Grass (Panicum virgatum ‘Heavy Metal’), and Northern Sea Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium). In the center of the roof, a lawn of specially blended Fescues (Festuca sp.) and Ryegrasses (Lolium sp.) survives drought without irrigation: Creeping Red Fescue, Spartan Hard Fescue, Azay Sheep’s Fescue, Fiesta Perennial Rye and Annual Rye Grass.
• The green roof absorbs stormwater and uses the nutrients it contains to nourish the plants. Without the green roof, this stormwater would run off and carry salts and dissolved chemical nutrients into Lake Champlain, polluting it and contributing to unwanted algae blooms.
• The layer of soil on the green roof varies from 6 -21 inches deep with an average depth of 12-14 inches. It can hold up to 80 lbs of weight per cubic foot including the soil itself, the grasses and stormwater. If too much water falls onto the roof at once, the excess runs into roof drains located below the soil and at the level of the grass and paving. However, since the roof is designed to absorb between 12 and 42 lbs of water per cubic foot, only very large storms overload it.
• The roof is not designed for growing vegetables or other plants with heavy nutrient and water requirements. Large storm events have the potential to wash some nutrients from the roof down the drains so adding compost or fertilizer to the roof could result in wasteful pollution of Lake Champlain.

Transportation

• With 100 outdoor spaces for bicycles and showers on every floor (in the gender-neutral bathrooms), the Davis Center makes it easier for people to walk, run or bike to campus.
• Main Street is one of Burlington’s busiest vehicle traffic areas, but thanks to the corridor that extends from the 1st floor of the Davis Center to the other side of Main Street, there is no longer any need to try to cross in front of cars. Check out the Sodexo Sustainability Gallery online and at the kiosk by corridor’s entrance to see how much energy and water the building is using in real time.
• The Campus Area Transportation System (CATS) shuttle buses pick up and drop off riders in front of the Davis Center oval near the building’s third floor entrance. These buses, which run on compressed natural gas and/or biodiesel, make it easy to get around campus.
• Local public transportation from Chittenden County Transportation Authority (CCTA) picks up on Main Street right outside of the Davis Center. Riding the CCTA buses, which run on biodiesel, is free for students, faculty and staff with an active UVM ID card.

Last modified January 24 2011 09:05 PM

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Both of the roofs shown above use an eaves overhang but no roof gutters were present.

However roof gutters were used on traditional sod roofed homes at least over entrances, as we show in this sod roof home photo.

A hand-sawn wooden roof gutter or eaves trough was installed, leaving the ends open as we have shown.

You may also notice the steel spikes nailed into rafter tails to keep the sod roof lower dam in place to prevent soil from sliding off of the roof. Other museum-grade sod roofs in The Romsdalsmuseet site in Oslo used carved wooden pegs in these locations, indicating a time when iron spikes were not readily available. You can see a wooden eaves dam peg in the next sod roof photo (below).

I just want to run down these rows of pink tulips, breathing in the floral scent and fresh air. It’s such a beautiful sight. So many tulips are all growing together in straight rows. You can’t tell in this photo, but these fields have tulips of many colors. My favorite would be the purple ones. First because I am fond of purple, and secondly, they are the flower I am using in my upcoming wedding.

While in the future tulips have a place in my wedding, but tulips have a history placing them in Central Asia. Stemming from the Turkish word tulbend or “turban” because of the turban shape, the tulip was cultivated in the Turkish Empire earlier than the 1500s. They later arrived in Holland, where they have become an icon of the county.

Thank you CU photographer gillisc for submitting your photo this week. Visit gillisc’s Tulip Fields gallery to see tons of tulips. The fields are full of different colors, all blooming in the spring sun.  

Please continue submitting photos! The CU Photos don’t just go on the web; they can end up in the print magazine, as well.

Keep submitting your photos every week to the CU photo-sharing site. Each week the Photo of the Week is taken from that week’s submissions. You have to submit every week for a chance to be the Photo of the Week! But you could see be featured in the magazine sometime!

Remember to fill out the captions and give your gallery a name all its own. The more we know about an image, the more we can take from it. I know I enjoy reading about the different animals, especially when they all have fun names.

I love having those “light bulb” moments when I finally “get” something. I’d lived off-grid for a number of years before I experienced a revelation about solar power. I had been watering our ever expanding garden from the dug well nearby. I would throw down a bucket on a rope, pull it back up, dump it in a bucket that held two of the smaller buckets, and once I had two of the larger ones filled up, I’d hike off into the garden, a bucket in each hand, to where I needed it. It was a brutal amount of work, and a stupid use of my energy, but I loved it. Michelle likened it to Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in “Fantasia.” Mickey uses brooms to carry tons of water in buckets up the stairs. I was one of the crazy brooms.  

Eventually Bill Kemp heard about this system of watering my garden, and he set about designing a better system by drawing some plans on a napkin at one of our meetings. Next thing you know I had a solar panel, a DC pump and a simple car/trailer plug, and the sun was doing the work for me. I put a foot valve on one end of the pipe that I put down the well, and I put a garden hose adapter on the other end of the pipe. This $80 pump (and 75Watt panel which was about $500 at the time but much cheaper today) can pull water from 10 feet down in the well, and pump it a good 300 ft. It can even lift it up about 40 feet to the rain barrels that are raised on a cedar crib I’d built. It’s brilliant. And it was the first time I finally clued into how much work a solar panel could do for me. In our house I didn’t have a point of reference. Solar power keeps my fridge running, but I’d never spent the winter cutting ice off a lake and storing it in sawdust in the icehouse to put into an icebox, so I can’t appreciate what’s it’s doing for me. And I’ve never had to wash my clothes on a rock, or with one of those old washing machines with the rollers that squeezed the water out of clothes.

But I had carried an insane amount of water around in buckets, and this solar pump displaced that human effort and I could truly appreciate how much I was accomplishing with the sun. It was very cool.

I had the same light bulb moment the other day when I took down a poplar tree out front. This tree was in a group of coniferous trees I’d planted 10 years ago. Pines and spruce love this soil and grow like weeds. Hardwoods are very slow, but poplars do really well here. But this lone poplar looked out of place and was getting too big to be that close to the house. So I cut it down. As I was cutting it up I was amazed at how big it was. I planted this 10 years ago and now I had a pretty good pile of firewood. In fact I started to think about how much “heat” was in this little pile.

 

Since it is poplar, which is softwood, it doesn’t have the same BTUs as hardwood. As I often do, I checked “The Renewable Energy Handbook” and “Appendix 1” tells me that poplar has 18,500 BTU/cord, versus 22,300 BTU/cord for Red Maple. That difference isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. So I’d say I that in the fall I’ll have 4 or 5 days worth of heat in this pile of wood and maybe in a cold January I’d have 2 or 3 days worth. So I started thinking about how many of these trees I’d have to plant to grow my whole season’s worth of wood. I would think if I planted two acres with poplar I could get a year’s worth of heat out of it after about a decade. So if you had 20 acres, you could plant two acres every year and be pretty much self-sufficient with firewood.

Now this is not scientific, it’s more of a gut feeling. And there are numerous variables such as how large and well insulated your home is, how efficient a woodstove you have, how cold the winter is, etc. But I think it would be quite doable. And if you were smart you’d plant lots of poplar but also intersperse some hardwoods like maple and oak in there too. That way after a decade as you started to harvest the poplar you’d have the hardwoods with a really good head start and once they didn’t have to compete for sun with the poplars they’d be ready to take off.

I think this is pretty cool. Managing a forest like this for heat. Harvesting it sustainably. Making a home for animals. Having these trees absorb CO2 as they grow.

I cut down the poplar now before it broke bud to make it easier to work with. But if you were trying to make yourself more independent you could wait until the leaves were fully out. Then you could pile all the branches with leaves in piles where you want to expand the garden and as they breakdown and decay they’d be building up the soil with the biomass that the tree had photosynthesized from the sun’s energy. It’s so cool.

I did my Solar and Wind Workshop at the Royal Botanical Gardens recently and I was excited to hear two of the participants talking at the break. I think they had been hesitant to think about heating with wood, but I explained how it’s carbon neutral. As a tree is growing it is absorbing C02 (carbon) and sequestering or storing that carbon in its woody mass. If it were to die and drop to the forest floor and rot, it would give off the same amount of heat and CO2 as it does when I burn it in my woodstove. I just speed the process up. And as long as you’re burning it in an efficient EPA-certified woodstove, you’re doing the right thing for the environment.

Now if you were to take some land and start planting your own trees, you’re actually going to be growing your own heat. How responsible. You’re not shifting the burden on to someone else to drill for natural gas and potentially cause dislocation to someone somewhere else. And you’re not going to take gas or oil that is carbon sequestered in the ground and burn it and release it to the atmosphere.

I realize heating with wood isn’t for everyone, but for people considering a move to the country I think it’s a pretty cool (hot) way to heat. And if you can get your property a few years before you move out to the country you can get started on planting trees and get a head start. Heating with wood reaches down to very primal level in most people. There’s something very primitive about gathering around a fire. Our Pacific Energy Woodstove has a glass door, which allows us to watch the flames. It’s large and stays very clean. And it keeps us very, very warm. Knowing where the wood came from and knowing I didn’t cause any negative impact on anyone else’s life to get that heat is a very satisfying feeling.

Photos by Cam Mather.  

 For more information about Cam or his books visit www.cammather.com or www.aztext.com. 

This guest post is by Mathew Carpenter of Sofa Moolah.

I’m an avid blog reader. My Google Reader is packed with hundreds of different blogs, each one covering a subject that I may or may not be directly involved in. There’s the work and marketing category, the finance blogs, and then the blogs that deal with subjects I really don’t know anything about, nor do I have any interaction with in my work or personal life.

Every time I scan over these blogs, I’m reminded of how I came into contact with them in the first place. It wasn’t through search, or even social media. It was because the authors of these blogs—ones that I would never have found on my own—went out of their way to pen a guest post for another blog I followed.

There’s a slight stigma attached to guest posting, at least in the field I work in. When most people see a guest post their immediate reaction turns to working out what the writer is promoting. Sure, it’s not entirely commercial—most guest posts have great content and an interesting take that you might never otherwise see—but the assumption that guest posts are commercially motivated is a pretty tough one to shake.

Part of the reason for it is that throughout the last few years, or at least up until the most recent line or Google search shake-ups, posting on other blogs was a great way to provide link diversity for your website. It was the solution of choice for SEOs and bloggers alike, with both eyeing up blogs not as sources of information or worthwhile outlets, but as link resources waiting to be exploited.

Today, I’m going to look at a different side of guest posting, one that’s completely unrelated to search engine benefits or PageRank juice. Today, we’re going to look at the brand and reputation that can be created through smart guest blogging. From building an audience for your own blog to increasing awareness of your product, here’s why you should guest blog for reputation alone.

1.Fresh faces often become the best readers.

Amongst bloggers, there’s a belief that the longer someone continues to read your website, the more they’re worth, at least from a purely business standpoint. The idea is that by building trust with your readers, they become more likely to view your future projects as a serious possibility.

For some bloggers, this could mean more ebooks sold, more opt-in leads generated, or a greater amount of referred readers. But amongst experts in online advertising, the opposite belief is true. Online ad experts value fresh visitors significantly higher than they do returners, largely because they’re more responsive to new content, and more likely to be interested in advertising.

You don’t need to sell advertising space on your blog, nor do you need to have something to sell in order to understand the value here. Fresh faces may not have a deep level of trust with you, but they have a newness to them that can often lead to valuable action. From selling products to converting a clickthrough reader to a subscriber, gaining fresh readers from guest posting really does work.

2. Guest posting improves your search visibility.

In the earlier days of search engine optimization, bloggers desperately sought out other high-traffic blogs in order to gain link juice from their websites. The assumption was that by linking to their own websites from a more influential source, they would gain approval from Google, in turn increasing their own website’s search visibility.

That may still be true, but the benefit of guest posting appears to be decreasing somewhat over time, particularly as content farms and other search exploiters milk the strategy. However, the real strength of guest posting isn’t just its ability to increase your website’s search visibility, but your own.

When you have an archive of guest posts, perhaps five published on five different blogs, a search for your name reveals multiple angles of your online publishing, multiple resources that a reader can learn about you from, and an entire results page of content. That’s definitely worth more than a single, solitary result for your own website in the first position.

3. Purely business? Take an opportunity to share your interests.

One of the blogs I find myself reading most often, and one that I’ve gained a lot of information from, is Tim Ferriss’ blog. Equal parts business blog, travel guidebook, and sports nutrition cheat sheet, it’s an eclectic mix of different subjects joined to create a very popular, very acclaimed blog.

But what makes it so great isn’t necessarily the mix of styles, nor the quality of the content, but the fact that despite technically being one man’s blog, it’s been opened up to a range of high quality, no-nonsense guest posters. For every post by Tim there’s generally another from a guest poster, often one with little to do with the previous post.

It’s tempting to be purely business online, often in an attempt to promote the suit-and-tie image that so many people think is essential in a “professional” role. But online readers aren’t interested in just the business side of you. Every successful business blog I can point to has used guest posts and an assortment of other smart techniques to be just as much personal content as it is pure business.

4. Great guest posts can quickly open doors.

I’ve noticed that many bloggers have started offering consultancy services, often with a portfolio or order page linked to in the sidebar of their own blogs. It’s a great idea, and one that can produce a useful form of income for full-time bloggers and professionals alike. But why stop at using your blog as a promotional outlet? Why not indirectly advertise your services using another blog?

I’m not suggesting you take over someone else’s blog with a purely promotional post, nor am I suggesting that you buy advertising space on other blogs. What I am suggesting is that you view each guest post as an opportunity to extend your brand onto other people, and as a change to add another knot into your online net. Even a non-promotional post can work wonders when it comes to helping other readers remember both you, your blog, and your services.

5. It can take several encounters for a reader to start listening to you.

It’s always disheartening to see a great blog that’s been given about a week’s worth of attention. It’s not an uncommon sight online – blogs that have received a week of consistent content are left to die by their authors. The reason? They didn’t receive the “instant hit” status that far too many bloggers expect to experience.

There’s an old ad industry saying, that it takes anywhere from six to ten impressions for any single advertisement to have an effect on you. If your first guest post doesn’t hit home, relax. It’s the first of many chances to capture the reader’s attention. Write consistent content, not just for your blog, but for others too, and eventually you will build an audience that’s interested in listening to you.

6. Yes, there are SEO benefits to writing guest blog posts.

While guest posts, published articles, and other content-driven SEO strategies may have lost a little bit of their search influence in recent months, they’re still an effective strategy for driving your blog or website up the search results. However, there’s a catch—one that may not have been around in the earlier days of search engine optimization.

Instead of posting your articles anywhere and everywhere, it’s now more important than ever for you to pick outlets that are authoritative, reliable, and trusted by Google. Aim for blogs with high quality audiences. Not only will these produce the best search-related benefits, they’ll also bring in significantly better short-term results from your post’s readers.

7. Guest posting builds long-term online connections.

If there’s one true benefit of guest posting, it’s this. While guest posting is great for getting a leg-up in the search engines, boosting traffic, and expanding your online influence, it has one benefit that outweighs all of its others: the connections it can create with other bloggers, online publishers, and influential people.

Not all bloggers are based in their bedrooms. Many have offices, businesses, and connections with very important people. Guest posting opens this world up to you, at least in the small slice you can gain by interacting with other bloggers. It also opens up long-term terms connections, ones that are capable of producing guest posts on your blog, and a publishing network that’s second to none.

Recommended resources

ProBlogger’s own guide to guest posting may be a year old, but it’s every bit as relevant today as it was when it came out. Read this to get your guest posts polished, professional, and reader-friendly.

Copyblogger shares ten simple tips for getting “in” with A-list bloggers and networking your way to great guest posting opportunities.

My Blog Guest is a great way to network with other bloggers and find guest posting opportunities.

Have you written a guest post recently? Did it boost your reputation? I’d love to hear how it went in the comments.

Mathew Carpenter is an 18-year-old-business owner and entrepreneur from Sydney, Australia. Mathew is currently working on Sofa Moolah, a website that teaches you how to make money online. Follow Mathew on Twitter: @matcarpenter. Follow Sofa Moolah on Twitter: @sofamoolah.