Snowklahoma Gardening

Creating accessibility to any area outside my house today, for all kinds of bodies, would require a snow plow, or at least a large shovel and a lot more gumption than I possess. For those of you on a cruise in the sunny Caribbean, or reading from somewhere else near the equator, you might not know that Snowklahoma is currently shut down due to Snowmageddon. I prefer my friend Ryan's name, Snowlapaloosa. Sounds more fun and exciting. Like a festival!

No schools. Most businesses are closed. "Stay off the roads," is the official emergency management plan. Wind-whipped snow and ice have filled the atmosphere, collecting in drifts and piles on streets and highways for the last 24 hours.

Hubby went to work last night just before it exploded into our county, packed and fully expecting to hang out at work for a day or two. So far he's been at the boiler plant through three shifts, moving soon into his regular midnight stint again. He should be able to get home tomorrow morning, if he can get his truck dug out of the drifts.

So, Cori and I are home, reading, browsing the i-net, cooking, napping. Yawn. Very much enjoying the down time...

-which includes another look at my accessible gardening book. (Accessible Gardening or People with Physical Disabilities: A guide to Methods, Tools and Plants, by Janeen R Adil.)

Warning: This next section involves MATH.

Arranging access from the house or parking lot to your accessible garden requires a pause to ponder a little math. Author Adil says,

"When there's a slope between the house and the garden, the gradient should be 1:20 or less; i.e., for every 20' of walkway, the path rises no more than 1'. This gradient of 5 percent may still be too steep for some, and if the pathway is long, level areas for resting may be required. A grade of no more than 3 percent (1:33.33) gives an even gentler slope, one that most wheelchair users would have no trouble negotiating."

For those of you suffering from a math disability, as I seem to be, allow me to illustrate how I would figure it.


You tie a 20 foot string to a stick at ground level at the top of the slope, then send a kid with the other end of the string down the slope 20 feet. This is the run. Kid #2 uses a level bubble to make sure the string is being held level and hollers at the first kid to lift the string up or down until it's held level. Kid #3 measures the distance from the ground to where Kid #2 is holding the string in the air. This is the rise.


The formula is Rise/Run. So if the rise is 1 foot (distance from the ground to where Kid #2 is holding the string level with the original ground position) divided by the run, or 20 feet of string, in this case.


Slope=1/20


Multiply by 100 to get 5%


So, my conclusion is that if the rise over 20 feet is more than a foot, it's too steep for a wheelchair user to negotiate comfortably without some serious landscape changes.


Whew. It's not really as hard as I make it! Feel free to correct my math or contribute a more understandable illustration!