Rain Gardens at NETC
The NETC Education Center is a good location for a rain garden demonstration site. It is open to the public, is in close proximity to Jewett Brook, has a large roof and is surrounded by impervious surfaces. With help from the Career Development Center we started to install our rain gardens in October 2009.
The size and depth of your rain garden will depend on the surface area of the roof that will be draining into it and the type of soil the garden will be grown in. We used the Vermont Rain Garden Manual to calculate that, with a roof of an area of 3,225 square feet and a sandy soil type, we needed a total of 806 square feet of garden space. To learn how to determine the size of a rain garden for your property see the Vermont Rain Garden Manual.
The project began on October 5th
Since we got started in the fall and we had a lot of garden to cover, so we decided to call in an excavator for assistance. The tasks the landscaper performed could be accomplished with a shovel and a little hard work.
Our goal was to manage all of the rain that comes off the roof of the Education Center. We wanted to collect it using rain barrels, or using a network of gutters and swales leading to each rain garden site. The northwest corner of the building is surrounded by pavement making it impossible to create a rain garden large enough to manage the amount of water that comes off this section of the building. This corner will now become a demonstration of how a series of rain barrels can catch a large amount of stormwater and hold it for later use in planters or flower boxes. We plant to capture up to 150 gallons of rainwater in any one storm event with our barrel system.
Water from the front half of northeast section of the building will be allowed to flow naturally from 812 square feet of roof to the ground where it will gently slide into a 203 foot rain garden that spans the length of half the building.
Water from the front half of the southeast section of the building will flow from the 812 square foot of roof, into a swale that is lined with rubber and crushed stone. The swales from each side of the roof are pitched to drain to the corner where a 203 square foot rain garden will hold water until the plants make us of it or the water drains into the soil.
Swale on the southeast corner.
Stone is layed to shatter the raindrops and slow the movement of the water.
A rain garden will span the entire length of the north side of the building.
The down spout of the gutter connects to a tube that carries water to the garden.
The buried tube carries water from the southwest corner.
Water from the back of the building, on the southwest corner, will be carried by gutter to one single downspout on the corner of the building. This downspout is connected to a plastic tube that is buried in the ground and carries water around to the side of the building into the 400 square foot rain garden.