Rain Garden Event

It is national Biodiverstiy week and we had a lovely Rain Garden event at The Glen Community Garden today. We were delighted to welcome young secologists from St Killians Forest School and their teachers as well as older members of the Glen Community.

We looked at the video by Bí Urban which shares their story about creating Rain Gardens in inner city Dublin, this initiative is the inspiration behind our project.

I showed another video about Rain Gardens built by Cork County Council in Cobh. These are planters made of concrete and installed on East beach, they are here  to absorb the run off of toxic water from roads, filtering it before returning any excess water to the sea. County council scientists are monitoring the levels of toxins as the water goes in and comes out, water leaving the planters have managed to reduce levels of heavy chemicals by a rate of 10 to 1.

We also looked at a massive rain garden in Shanghai, built on the tracks of the old railway line running through the city to the estuary of the Yangtze river.

Community health worker and Glen Gardener, Barry Hickey showed us the prototype rain garden planter he has built for our project – it is made out of recycled timber and is attached to the down pipe of the Community Garden prefab. We discussed the plants that might go into it. Barry is experimenting with planting at the moment – he hasn’t watered the garden since he installed it and the chives are looking a bit sorry for themselves. Barry believes that broad leaf plants may work better as there is more surface area for evaporation to take place as well as capacity for absorption.

We finished up with a delicious lunch prepared by Barry and co and talked about the next phase of the project which will be the building of  garden planters with groups in the community.