An Update from the Sustainable Rain Gardens Project

Sustainable Seattle completed installing and planting five rain gardens as part of our Sustainable Rain project. This important milestone means we have demonstration gardens at businesses and organizations in the Central District, White Center, West Seattle, and two different locations in Beacon Hill. We are now planning community workshops in each of the neighborhoods to spread the word about this neighborhood project and how residents can install their own rain garden. We will also be announcing a rain garden scholarship project to help fund more rain gardens in the Seattle area.

Rain gardens are attractive landscape features that remove pollutants from storm water runoff before it reaches Puget Sound. These shallow depressions are designed to absorb and treat rainwater from paved surfaces such as roofs, parking areas, and sidewalks. A rain garden has rich soil and usually native plants adapted to changing water levels. The soil and plants remove pollutants from storm water and reduce flooding and overflow in the sewer system.

We have designed our rain gardens to be more than this, however. They will be a demonstration, an inspiration for businesses and community members to take the next step towards sustainability. All of our neighborhoods were selected because rain gardens were not present yet and so that neighbors could have access to them and learn from them. Rain gardens are one of the tangible things that property owners can do to reduce storm water pollution. Participating business owners are getting some other sustainable business ideas on topics as diverse as reducing solid waste to encouraging community engagement for employees.

We would again like to thank our great partners that have been working with us on this: Home Grown Organics, Rain Dog Designs, Stewardship Partners, Alleycat Acres, and Creatives4Community. Youth from Creatives4Community reached out to businesses in the neighborhoods to find participants. A big thank you to all the volunteers who came out to excavate and plant the rain gardens! Our rain gardens will be a part of the 12,000 Rain Gardens in Puget Sound map. We are producing signs for each of the sites, showing how a rain garden works and what they do. They will match signs at other sites installed by Stewardship Partners as part of the 12,000 Rain Gardens.

We also want to thank our participating organizations, most of whom came to us and asked to participate and worked patiently with us on this new project. Our participants include Big Al Brewery in White Center, whose rain garden required jack-hammering asphalt and now sits next to their outside beer garden area. In Beacon Hill, we installed rain gardens at El Centro de la Raza, Latino cultural center, and Helen B. Ratcliff, a woman's transitional prison facility. Green Plate Special, a educational garden and cooking project in a vacant lot in the Central District, now has a rain garden to treat the run-off from their kitchen facilities thanks to Sustainable Rain. And in West Seattle, Alexandria Melchior warmly embraced her rain garden for her newly renovated yard at her residence and business property.

Sustainable Rain garden workshops where you can learn about how to install a rain garden and about rain garden scholarships:

November 14, 6:30 -8:30 at 2100 Building in the Central District
November 16, 6:30-8:30 at Big Al Brewery in White Center

More workshop announcements coming.

Check out our Facebook page for updates and news on when and where these workshops will be occurring!

Help with the digging of the first Sustainable Rain Garden in West Seattle!

We are constructing our first rain garden on July 30th in West Seattle at 5902 SW California Ave. and we invite interested volunteers to come and learn about rain gardens, while you help build one! We will be hand-digging our first rain garden at this private residence and business site from 10 until about 2. Come when you can, no previous experience necessary. Bring your own shovel and gloves if you have them. Bring children if you can closely supervise them. And bring water! Come help build sustainable neighborhoods, protect Puget Sound, and bring what you learn home!

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

(Photo by Stewardship Partners; Rain garden in Puyallup.)

Read the article below written by Amy Waterman, the project lead for our Sustainable Rain Project. You can learn more about not only our projects, but also about rain gardens themselves. Do you know what they are for? How they help the environment and the surrounding communities? Saturday is a great day to learn the answers to these questions and many others. You can help protect Puget Sound and sustainable businesses. Questions? Contact info@sustainability.org or amy@sustainability.org.

Sustainable Rain: We’re Not All Wet Behind the Ears Anymore
By Amy Waterman, Project Lead

This is an update from the field on Sustainable Rain, Sustainable Seattle’s project to create rain garden demonstration projects at small businesses and organizations in Seattle funded by the Russell Family Foundation. The goal of this project is to energize the business/organization leaders and their communities around creating positive change for their own property that also benefits the community. Rain gardens are one tangible piece of a “sustainable neighborhood.”

Rain gardens, in case you haven’t heard, are basically very attractive stormwater treatment areas that can be used in relatively small spaces to treat the runoff from roofs, driveways, and sidewalks through a carefully designed basin with extra rich soil and plants adapted to different water levels. We will be working in some of our denser neighborhoods to install rain gardens, do education and outreach on their benefits, and also teach business/organization leaders about sustainable practices that go beyond “green.”

We have five forward-thinking leaders who have agreed to work with us to learn more about sustainable practices and allow us to install a rain garden on their property. Our leaders are the Laura Dewell from Green Plate Special organization in the Central District, Doug Jans from the Pioneer Human Services’ Helen B. Ratcliff House in Beacon Hill, Alexandria Melchior, property owner in West Seattle, Estela Ortega, director of El Centro de la Raza, and Noelle Brown from Big Al Brewery in White Center. We are pleased and proud to be working with these organizations and individuals.

We are proud to be working with our partners on this project: Creatives for Community, Homegrown Organics, Alleycat Acres, and Stewardship Partners. Sustainable West Seattle is also an important ally on this project.

Stewardship Partners have been very helpful in getting us started, due to their experience with many community rain garden projects. We have been getting the word out in the neighborhoods and talking to potential participants with the help of Creatives for Community youth (C4C) as well as lots of ideas that came from Sustainable West Seattle. One of our potential sites (which unfortunately did not have enough space for a rain garden) was The Station Café in Beacon Hill and they came to us directly from the canvassing work of C4C. I have been working closely with Homegrown Organics, a local landscaping company that was involved with Sustainable Seattle’s first rain garden last year, to evaluate sites and do technical review to determine if a rain garden will work on an interested parties’ property. Rain gardens are one of many innovative ways to clean up stormwater and they do NOT work everywhere, as has been demonstrated in Seattle already.

This project is ambitious with a short time frame, with all five rain gardens, sustainability training, and community education happening this calendar year. Although El Centro de la Raza and Big Al Brewery are still undergoing some feasibility review, we are moving forward in July with design work and sustainability interviews, beginning at the other three sites. Over the rest of the summer, we will begin construction and develop agreements with landowners on maintenance of the rain gardens. Some sites will be excavated in July and planted in September, in time for the fall rains and some may be completed in July. We are going to be volunteers soon help build the rain gardens and welcome questions, and feedback on the projects, as they take shape. As the rain gardens are completed, we will be holding community meetings to share the project’s lessons and results and provide some training for those interested in pursuing a rain garden on their property.

There will another upcoming volunteer opportunity in mid-August to plant in all five of the rain gardens around the city. Look out for announcement of this on our website and facebook page.