Crowd-sourced Rain Garden Installed

The long awaited post about the Rain Garden installation at St. Paul's is here! On May 31st, 2014, the NJ Tree Foundation arrived at St. Paul's Lutheran Church near the 5 Corners, to create a beautiful, natural stormwater infiltration system aka a rain garden. The 5 foot by 50 foot garden will collect rain runoff from the adjacent parking lot. It will capture about 700 gallons per storm or about 25,000 gallons a year. That is a lot of water they are keeping out of Jersey City's ancient, and regularly overflowing combined sewer system!

Here is the rain garden with the installation team and members of St. Paul's and SJC. During excavation and planting, NJ Tree Foundation educated community volunteers both orally and through hands-on experience on creating and planting the rain garden. It was a fun filled day with the DJ spinning tunes and shovels in the ground. See more pictures here.

St. Paul's Rain Garden - Compost + Plant List

SJC couldn't be happier about how this project turned out. This was the first time crowd-scourced funding on ioby.org was used to get our grass-roots efforts physically into the ground. The over-arching idea of using green infrastructure to reduce our flooding and CSO problem is really gaining traction both around the country and in Jersey City. In fact, SJC has partnered with P.S. 5 to turn some of their great rain capturing ideas into reality. Please help us reach our goal of raising $6,000 to install 80 feet of rain garden planters in front of the school and a 300 gallon rain barrel collecting water from the roof.

This is a great learning opportunity for the students and larger community. It opens the conversation up as to what individuals can do to help solve these water management problems.

PS#5’s work has also earned them the Bronze award with National Wildlife Federation’s Eco-Schools USA program which supports and recognizes schools efforts to integrate sustainability into the curriculum and school grounds. Also, PS#5 Eco-Cougars were named National Finalists in the Siemens' "We Can Change the World" challenge. They were one of three schools in New Jersey to be awarded this honor.

Additional resources on how you can partner with SJC and ioby to fund your project check out our ioby Partnership page.  Lots of information about rain gardens, green infrastructure and a whole lot more can be found on our Resources page.