Drainage

Commissioners receive surprise airport tax bill The Carroll County commissioners received an unexpected tax bill, amounting to nearly $38,000. Because the county's new corporate hangars at the Carroll County Regional Airport are leased to private companies, they are subject to county and state property taxes. The bill is for fiscal year 2004. The county will pay the $4,276 state portion immediately. It will not pay the county portion, however, because no money was budgeted. On a recommendation from Eugene C. Curfman, county comptroller, the commissioners exempted the airport for fiscal year 2005.

My black-eyed Susans for the second year have developed brown spotty leaves. Some leaves brown completely and dry out. This happens when they are about 8-10 inches tall before they bloom. It doesn't affect the blooms, which is what black-eyed Susans are all about, but the leaves ruin the effect of the flowers. They are in full sun and the soil is a clay-topsoil mix. Do you have any idea what may be causing this? There are several possibilities. Rudbeckia are prone to many leaf spot diseases, with septoria leaf-spot fungus being the most prevalent.

A 14,145-acre triangle of the Upper Patapsco River drainage basin in Carroll County has been added to the state's Rural Legacy Program, designed to buy conservation easements against development on a variety of land, such as farms, forests, wildlife areas and historic sites. The new designation - the second in Carroll County - was announced last week at a state Board of Public Works meeting, said Bill Powel, program manager for the Agricultural Land Preservation Program of Carroll County.

Cissell Avenue in North Laurel is pockmarked by the ravages of rain. It has swept so much soil from Ron Giddings' front yard that his cable lines are exposed. It has knocked the foundation out from under a neighbor's mailbox. It has eaten away at the ditches beside the road, rushed underneath the old pavement and triggered collapses. And water regularly pools on Donna Thewes' property, even though she put in two extra sump pumps and French drains all around her house. The Howard County neighborhood is a potent reminder of the unintended consequences of man altering the landscape without fully accounting for the wrath of Mother Nature.

Jim Swank stopped his white Jeep on a bridge on Miller Road and pointed to a section off the side where the concrete had eroded. "The concrete got weak, and poof, away it went," said the supervisor of the Whiteford district for Harford County Highway Maintenance. The heavy rains of the past few weeks had worn away the concrete, Swank explained. "It could possibly structurally ruin the bridge," he said, adding that a work crew would be out to the spot soon. Among the woes brought by the constant spring rains this year, the county's roads, from the asphalt to the earthen, have taken a beating, with the waters wearing down concrete, shifting stone and causing headaches galore for the crews that work to keep the roads open.

Give us gardeners a break. Last year we put in drought-tolerant plants. We bought soaker hoses, watered with buckets of "gray" water and watched our gardens and lawns shrivel up and die in the heat. Then we lost more plants to a harsh, snowy winter. Now we're having a spring like they have in Seattle -- one that's downright cold for Baltimore. Starting the week before Preakness, there have been misty rains, long, slow drizzles, hard steady rains or thundershowers almost every day. Rainfall is around six inches above normal for the year.

Charm City isn't the most environmentally conscious of towns. Sure, people care, but Baltimore, with its hibernating shipyards, warehouses and other ghosts of industry past, just finds it hard to connect to nature sometimes. After all, hon, this isn't the crunchy-granola parts of the West Coast, and April 22 can sometimes pass by like any other day here. But Earth Day events do exist in the area; check out the following guide for ways to celebrate Tuesday's 40th anniversary of the Clean Air Act of 1963 and the 20th anniversary of the 1983 Chesapeake Bay Agreement without a hassle.

Rugged but artful dry streambeds can look as old as the hills, but they turn tricky drainage problems into handsome elements in any garden design. Dry streams are really just above-ground drainage channels lined with rocks and placed to look as though nature had done the work herself. When it rains, water that would otherwise cut a muddy swath through a yard splashes along the stones in a streambed designed to handle the flow. When it's not raining, the dry streambed is a striking decorative feature, a rock garden around which plants naturally thrive.

ABOUT THIS time a year ago, the first reports surfaced in this column that some of the putting greens at Hobbit's Glen, the Columbia Association's showcase golf course, were a mess. Official rationalizations, as it turned out, came quickly, along with exhortations for golfers to just wait for Mother Nature to work her magic. So golfers waited, but whatever magic had been expected went poof. In September, the Columbia Association's management came clean, grudgingly, after bringing in a United States Golf Association agronomist.

AFTER MORE than a decade of effort to reduce agricultural pollution, a major source of the Chesapeake Bay's ills, scientists and environmental managers are questioning how much effect it's having. Despite impressive action by many farmers, pollution in rivers that drain farmland remains high, and the two basic causes of it don't seem to have diminished. Sales of commercial fertilizer across the bay's 64,000-square-mile, six-state watershed have remained stable since the late 1980s, and manure from farm animals has increased in many areas.