Humanize the Earth!

I met with Kevin from Xero Flor America, LLC tonight.  The name is a bit confusing because their website is xeroflora.com.  Anyway, they’re the leading contenders for suppying our green roof.  A green roof means growing stuff up there.  Not flowers or anything, but sedum.  Sedum is a succulent that’s ideal because it can hold a lot of water, but is also very drought resistant.  The whole point of having a green roof is to reduce stormwater runoff.  Well, that’s one of the points.  Here in Chicago when we have heavy rains, the water treatment plants can’t handle all of the volume in our combined storm water and sewage system so we release raw sewage into the river.  That’s bad, obviously.  So here at the HUB (my co-op) this year we’re going ot install a green roof, which should vastly reduce the amount of runoff we have.  We’re also depaving part of our concrete courtyard to plant a rain garden, which is native grasses that grow really deep roots so then can absorb a lot of water.  Water for the rain garden will come from our disconnected downspouts as well as our rainbarrels.  Wow, we’re doing a lot!  We’ll see how it goes.  Anyway, let me know if you have experiences with Xero Flor.  Thanks!