July 4, 2020 A New Picture

Click on this for a bigger picture of our Creekside Farm.

• The light green blob of land is the high point of the Farm at 231 feet.
• The purple blobs in the creek are the creek bottom at 216 feet.
• The lowest point of the Farm is in blue.
• Each line shows a two foot change in elevation.

I created this picture using a combination of Google Maps, Google Earth, and Photoshop. At the top of the image there is a section in red which we call the Kitchen Garden. At the bottom is the Chicken Run. The brown area above this is MacGreggor's Market Garden.  Just above that is the House, tiny house, Kennels, and all of the shop space and storage. At the Right side is Sell Road. The left side is the West Fork of Dairy Creek. The yellow portion of the creek I marked to show a landslide we noticed which was a source of my concern. As it turned out the slide area doesn't appear to be severe or widening at this point. It took quite a lot of work to prepare an image which has enough information on it to know if the Creek is beginning to be a problem or not.

The base image (bottom, if you think of a stack of transparencies laid one on top of the other) is from Google Earth. I have been spending quite a bit of my limited free time learning the limits of the free version of Google Earth. In this base image I carefully laid out the topography of the Farm using colored lines and noting elevations, mostly to get a good idea of the slope of the West Fork of Dairy Creek. The Creek is hard to see from anywhere on the Farm and I really wanted to get to know it better since it was a source of concern for us. The Farm is generally located above a 228 foot elevation and rises to just above 231 feet (the light green blob). But at the Creek's edge it drops off quickly down to the water at about 218 feet.  In Winter the Creek rises to about 224 feet routinely and can get up to 225 feet at times. Knowing how the Creek works allows us to forego finding flooding solutions and planting bank stabilizing stuff.

The first over-layered image is from Google Maps. I took a satellite image from it and have used the same image to practice laying out the features of the Farm, including finding where to put the Gardens and siting the Farmhouse.

This is the Farm plan for 2020
used in the image above it.

I have made many such images over the five years we have been involved in the project, but none of these could be very accurate because we lacked a way to show the place in more than one dimension. The underlying Google Earth image allowed me to put the two dimensional image into a more proper context.

I hope to further improve these image to reflect the reality of the Farm and give us a better understanding of how the land looks. It is difficult to get a handle on the project when standing on the ground this image allows us to make better decisions regarding land uses.