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Growing a garden with rain
Published October 24, 2007
WALTON COUNTY — As the rain poured down Monday, Elaine Oakes, executive director of Keep Walton Beautiful, smiled at the first real test of the Walton Recycling Center’s brand new rain garden.
With the state under severe watering restrictions, many are looking for ways to preserve water and stretch supplies as far as they can go.
The rain garden, part of a three-way project at the recycling center between Keep Walton Beautiful, the Monroe Rotary Club and the University of Georgia, doesn’t conserve water — the recycling center has a separate rain barrel set up for that purpose — but instead purifies water as it returns to the ground.
“We’re all becoming more and more aware of water issues in Georgia,” Oakes said. “This is not about water quantity, this is about water quality.”
At the tours KWB operates for county third-grade students, Oakes said water has become an important issue, especially the damage that run-off can do to streams and rivers.
“We’ve really been concentrating on water,” Oakes said.
Among things that can often find their way into Georgia rivers, often through storm drains, are animal waste, motor oil, car wash residue and run-off of other chemicals that can taint natural water sources.
“A lot of our streams and rivers could turn out ruined,” said Douglas Bennett, the project coordinator for the Rotary Club. “This helps the streams and wildlife.”
Although the rain garden doesn’t look like much — especially without the plants intended to accompany the project, still missing due to the watering restrictions — the project is actually a complex set of soil and material mixes, along with piping, to increase the quality of the water running off from the recycling center and into the groundwater.
Although the rain garden took some work from the Rotarians to dig the hole, help install the plumbing and then pack the proper mixture on top of the soil, the basic premise of the garden is simple.
Water from the surrounding area is directed toward the garden, through gutters, landscaping and other means, where the earth absorbs the run-off water. Impurities in the water from chemicals in the area are absorbed by a mixture of sand, compost, soil and gravel in the uppermost layer of the garden while the purer water continues to sink until absorbed into the groundwater.
“It will go through that engineered soil, then another filtering layer of gravel,” said Frank Henning, the UGA watershed extension agent for the region. “It’s like a big sand filter or coffee filter. It’s going to clean that water up.”
To prevent standing water from building up in case of torrential rain in future, non-drought-ridden times, pipes can funnel excess water into drainage systems.
Oakes is already planning to include the rain garden in her next school tours and hopes to see the rain garden, and future rain gardens in the county, thrive at the center.
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