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Originally Posted by JDeere
Appreciate Grant’s reply but I would still like someone from a scientific background tell me that fertilizing the lawn and staying within the law does ANY harm to the lake.
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Although I have been educated, trained, and have careered in science, the best education one can get is to simply watch the lake for fifty years from one spot.
We plopped ourselves onto an acre -- surrounded by piney woods -- and marked about a dozen trees to build a modest "camp", as they are called in NH.
Through a "misunderstanding",
all the eastern white pines on our lot were felled, and some trees that we had marked for removal (with a painted white circle) were left standing. We had to saw those down -- as well as the double-insult of having to carry away all the branches left from the white pines. (White pine is still a very valuable tree commodity, and comprise 99% of double-trailer logging truck loads). I mention "sawing", as "chainsaws" back then were as heavy as outboards -- a two-handled steel saw was easier for a man (and this boy).
Now, mine is the first Winnipesaukee generation since the 1920's to stop drinking Winnipesaukee water, and what does this have to do with white pines?
Since the last Ice Age -- or, for a hundred centuries -- huge mats of pine-needles have retained the soil, slowed soil movement for moss, and filtered the surface water that flows into Lake Winnipesaukee from all of the surrounding land higher in elevation than the Lake. (The Lake Winnipesaukee Basin).
We have watched a hundred lots around us drop the marketable white pines, spread loam, and plant and fertilize lawns -- right down to Winnipesaukee's rocky edge. The lawn-maintenance people, (whose lakefront clientele are a small part of their business) are only concerned that their absentee clients' lawns are an even, and deep, green.
The lower branches of a few remaining trees are removed so that the new homes can have "a view from every room", and allow the sun to "grow" the lawn -- and, incidentally, to warm shallow waters.
A lawn can't grow in a forest.
We also watch as the algae starts growing earlier after each ice-out and spread long green slimey threads from plants and twigs in the lake throughout the summer. The threads are also growing in deeper water than ever before. The lake bottom
feels gooey.
Our neighbors are having truckloads of pine needles brought in to keep their lots from washing into the lake!
What's wrong with this picture?
I'm not optimistic about saving the lake, and there's still many more lake problems that would fill still more space here. (Fortunately, nobody's devised a giant wave-making machine for the Weirs yet).
The State doesn't have the will to obstruct newcomers' whims, and to possibly slow this state's growth. (Now one of the fastest in the U.S., according to today's SPNHF newsletter).
Shorefront Protection enforcement is nil -- something
else I have been watching from the same spot for 50 years.