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Greetings and salutations!  Just a quick heads up that I’ve been adding new revolving content to “In the Watershed” - see right hand column. Theres also a new category called “Partner Notes”. I’ll be slowly but surely adding information about the different groups we work with.

Also, if anyone’s keeping track, we’ve just upgraded to Wordpress version 2.6.1.

Many thanks, Alison

Somewhere along the way I’ve managed to get into poison ivy. My arm is slightly swollen with one nasty looking rash painted a flaking chalky pink. Lovely. I also twisted my wrist funny while biking along the river yesterday so I’ve got this nappy wrist wrap on, too.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be filming some of the Wetland Learner activities as well as being photographed myself for a feature in the Lawrence Magazine later this summer. I think I’ll wear long sleeves.

I have to say that the poison ivy at the river seems to be thriving while the tomatoes I cleverly planted before July this year seem to be getting paler by the day. The trials of gardening in Kansas.

In today’s Dragonfly Messenger I reported on the availability of a number of historic publications through KSU’s Research & Extension. I took a lull in the afternoon to flip through Walter Balch’s 1937 bulletin on Home Vegetable Gardens. He included a horse-drawn-cultivator-friendly layout for the average 1/2 acre Kansas home garden, encouraged the autumn application of well rotted manure, and discouraged the use of imported seedlings suggesting it would be better to focus on overall production quality than force early production. My tomatoes are looking even paler now!

Archived mailing

Earlier this week Eileen Ernst’s 3rd graders sampled Indian Creek near the North Topeka Recreation Center. Notebooks in hand, they compared their findings with the information they gathered last fall. The most noteable difference - stream flow. There’s actually enough water in the stream to watch it spilling over rocks. The mayfly nymphs are bigger and they found dragonfly nymphs.

When we got to the site a work crew was repairing a waterline crossing the stream. The work crew was openly impressed and they suspended work long enough for us to complete our sampling without having to compete with the noise of heavy equipment. I noticed them lingering a bit to watch the students in action.

Over the last 9 years StreamLink has been an important component of the 3rd grade curriculum. The field excursions are much anticipated by Rochester students and remembered for years into the future. Her first set of StreamLink students are now seniors.

Nominated for a 2007 Kansas Wildlife Federation Award, Eileen has set a marvelous precedent and provided an extraordinary example for other elementary teachers. She’ll retire as a classroom teacher at the end of this school year but I fully anticipate we’ll be seeing her again soon. -Alison Reber

NEWS FLASH!  The event scheduled for tomorrow morning has been postponed.  Thunderstorms are being forecast.

Spring in Kansas is notoriously unpredictable - the variability is part of what we love about it here but geez, winter just doesn’t want to let go. It’s starting to impact our field season. The Wetland Learners event scheduled for last Friday had to be postponed.

We’re still all systems go for Lawrence’s Rain Shower’s to Water Towers event tomorrow but I’m definitely going with the layered look.

Wild Birds Unlimited in Shawnee, Kansas, has stocked up on copies of Exploring the Kaw Valley. These are now officially out of print so catch ‘em while you can! As many of you will recall this book, authored by Lynn Byczynski and dedicated to KVHA’s founder Joyce Wolf, has a series of annotated driving loops of natural and cultural interests in the Kansas River Valley.

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The last event in the Westport to Wakarusa Poetry series is set to take place next Thursday, 4/24, at the Haskell Cultural Center and Museum at the Haskell Indian Nations University 7 to 9 pm. Smokey McKinney and Ken Lassman will be sharing some of their writing and insights. The poetry series is a KVHA Partner Project with the Lawrence Poetry Community.

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April Foolin’ by Alison Reber

Alright alright…. I’ve got the website looking a bit more respectable. In fact, I’m actually pretty darn pleased! I love this new template - I haven’t had to do any hard-code tinkering and the “plugins” are actually working the way they’re supposed to.

The calendar is back together and I’ve got an interactive map up and running. There’s a forum now but I can’t figure out how to make a post so it might be a bit before we can start to communicate that way. I don’t have the Dragonfly Messenger rss back in place but that’s **simple**.

Keep an eye out for a listing of field event dates!

Greetings from yet another template… by Alison Reber

A number of years ago I had a tramatic web experience. It was lunchtime and I was breezing through some files trying to eliminate duplicate materials and consolidate hard drives. By the time the rest of the gang got back I’d unwittingly deleted the entire StreamLink website.

Wordpress.com has given me a pretty unbreakable way to develop a website content management system. However, the unbreakable part also has meant limiting our interactive bells and whistles. Recently I finally decided to bite the bullet and migrated kvha.wordpress.com to a private hosting service.

It has not been as smooth as it might be for most people. In the course of adding said bells and whistles, I managed to delete the “template” I’d customized for our website.

The short of the long is the nice folks at HostMySite.com have poured the content into the default template. There are a few more snargles to deal with before I can put the customized template back….

(PS all you former interns can stop snickering!!)

Roger Hill Volunteer Center logo

Roger Hill Volunteer Center, 2518 Ridge Court
Lawrence , KS 66046

http://www.rhvc.org/

Description: The Roger Hill Volunteer Center serves as a hub for volunteer opportunities in Douglas County. The Center, named after the late Roger Hill, an active community leader and advocate of volunteerism, maintains a current database, website and booklet of volunteer needs in Douglas County. “Connecting People to Volunteering”

RHVC works closely with the United Way.

RHVC has sent numerous volunteers our direction as well as provided training and networking opportunities for KVHA to learn how to manage volunteer assistance effectively.

8/13/08 Most recently RSVP volunteers from Pioneer Ridge helped fold 500 newsletters for the Grassland Heritage Foundation.  Thank you to Ashlee Crowlee and the RHVC’s RSVP for making this happen!

Volunteer With RSVP

Adults 55 and over are the most active, healthy, and educated generation with valuable skills and experiences.  Senior Corps has found a way to harness these talents and engage this population through RSVP.  RSVP helps those 55 years and over to use their talents and knowledge while serving their communities through volunteer work.

A snow-filled channel through a freshly constructed stormwater retention “wetland”. The mock wetlands are east of the Haskell campus and northeast of the Baker/Haskell Wakarusa Wetlands. Haskell Indian Nations University Ecology students are using the area to study stormwater outflows from different types of wetland areas. A major interest is how to integrate green infrastructure with environmental needs such as habitat restoration. The wetland slows stormwater from the north and then drains south into a tributary of the Wakarusa River.

A Rails-to-Trails walking trail runs along the east side of the wetland.

These projects are part of the Kansas StreamLink program in cooperation with the City of Lawrence, HINU, and the Jayhawk Audubon Society. Funding for StreamLink is provided in part by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the United States EPA.