Carleton’s summer landscaping work remains on budget despite suffering delays due to Ottawa’s record rainfall this summer.
According to Kevin Gallinger, Carleton’s director of maintenance services, the $40,000 annual landscaping budget covers buying flowers, trees, shrubs, tools, fertilizers and other items. However, he said the budget does not include labour costs.
Gallinger said Carleton switched landscaping contractors to Cedar Springs Limited in November 2016 after its previous contract with Greenbelt ended. Cedar Springs is responsible for half the landscaping work on campus, while Carleton students contribute approximately $66,000 in labour, Gallinger said.
“Our purchasing policy at Carleton requires us to go back out to the public,” Gallinger said of the switch in contractors.
According to Gallinger, this summer’s landscaping projects involved work on the quad behind the Mackenzie Building, main pedestrian pathways, residence buildings and the new Health Sciences building.
He said tasks such as cutting grass and planting flowerbeds were delayed due to the weather, taking one or two days after heavy rainfall.
“We do have reasonably good drainage on campus, so most of that water would disappear,” Gallinger said. “It depends on the volume of rain that we receive; the number of days in a row it came.”
According to a recent CBC article, both May and July shattered rainfall records for Ottawa, while June was the rainiest month in nearly two decades. The Rideau Valley Conservation Authority reported rainfall totals in Ottawa were “1.65 times normal amounts.”
David Phillips, a senior climatologist at Environment Canada, said the jet stream—a band of wind circling high above the earth’s surface—is to blame for the rainy weather, since it is above eastern Ontario rather than northern Canada this year.
“A lot of the weather systems took a ride on the jet stream,” Phillips explained.
“It’s almost a disbelief that nature could come with this much moisture as it did this year,” he added. “I don’t think the model would have suggested it would be this wet.”
Gallinger said that dry weather in previous summers also posed landscaping challenges.
“The drought would create more work for us because of the additional maintenance needs to be done on the areas that get damaged,” he said. “Extra work is required to try to maintain the plants.”
While this summer’s rainy weather delayed landscaping, Gallinger said the rain had its benefits for the campus environment.
“The trees are well watered. The trees are healthier,” he said.
According to Gallinger, summer landscaping is not as difficult to manage as snow removal.
“The winter is just so much more challenging because of the variations in the weather,” he said. “With the freezing rain and the warmer temperatures that we have, that becomes much more of a burden.”
Photo by Meagan Casalino
