College Garden resident’s project benefits the environment

Wednesday, August 3, 2005

When Ethan Carleton, ¹2, was looking for a service project to complete for school credit at Julius West Middle School, his parents had the perfect idea.

After attending some College Gardens community workshops about small­scale ways residents could help alleviate the damaging effects of stormwater runoff, they suggested constructing a rain garden.

Carleton and his parents, Luci Roberts and Jim Carleton, found a prime location between their property and their neighbor’s property. With their neighbor’s approval, they got to work, and now have a rain garden to match their rain barrel.

‘‘It’s essentially a garden just built in a low spot designed to collect water,” Jim Carleton said.

The garden is a detention device to keep the water from running into the gutters, he explained, and the vegetation transpires a certain amount.

When subdivisions and impervious surfaces are constructed, the hydrologic balance that used to be present changes, causing rain to run into streams and local bodies of water at a very fast and energetic pace, Jim Carleton said. Rain gardens help bring some of that balance back by collecting a shallow pool that gradually seeps back into the land, he added.

Carleton’s family already had green thumbs from years of growing native plants on their property, so this project seemed a natural fit.

‘‘This is a subject close to our hearts,” said Jim Carleton, who studied environmental engineering and works for the Environmental Protection Agency.

The family finished digging and planting the garden in one weekend.

‘‘That was the fairly easy part,” Ethan Carleton said, adding that his presentation poster for school was more difficult to put together.

Jim Carleton suspects that maybe more people haven’t jumped on board with rain gardens because they are daunted by the physical labor involved and the soil­disposal issue, he said.

‘‘These [gardens] aren’t necessarily as hard to build as people may think they are, based on our experience,” he said.

The Carleton family added some of the dug­up soil to an area of the garden that would help detain the water, spread some in various parts of their yard, and disposed of the rest at the dump.

The more people that use rain gardens, the better it would be for the environment, Jim Carleton said.

‘‘We’re hoping that our neighbors will also do the same thing,” he said.