HOW TO START
A Community Rain Garden Team
​Community Rain Garden Teams are volunteer programs which coordinate the installation of rain gardens on residential, commercial, and public properties within a given area. Read on to learn more about how these programs function, why they're important, and how you can get involved in making your community more resilient.
Why Start A Rain Garden Program?​
​People start rain garden programs for a number of reasons. Rain gardens remain an important strategy for addressing the issues of stormwater pollution, flooding, and habitat loss on a residential scale. In our watersheds, dense development dominated by residential properties makes large-scale ecological restoration impractical.
Funding
Funding is an essential part of establishing a sustainable community rain garden program. From the cost of native plant plugs, tools, soil amendments, and possibly landscaper fees, it isn’t always cheap to build rain gardens! Thankfully, there are myriad ways to fund your rain garden program.
Grants
One of the most significant sources of funding for our programs has been through grants. Various foundations and state/federal agencies offer grant funding programs. GGC is continually seeking funding through grants.​
Donations
Donations are a simple but effective way to secure funding for your rain garden program. If you are an individual or small group of people, working with a nonprofit can help open your program up to a larger donor pool. In our case, donations from partner organizations like the Darby Creek Valley Association support our rain garden programs.
Homeowner Cost-Sharing
If you’re unable to secure all of your funding needs from grants and donations alone, another model is homeowner cost-sharing. For our rain garden program in Upper Darby, we currently require that the homeowner match 20% of the total cost of the rain garden.
Considering the extra fees incurred by working with a landscaper, this small amount can go a long way. In addition, having the homeowner pay a portion of the cost can ensure they are invested in their rain garden and will continue to maintain it after installation is through. ​
Property Assessments
A property assessment is an evaluation of a property’s suitability for rain garden construction. These evaluations include several steps to determine if a rain garden could properly function in a proposed site and whether or not the site aligns with your program goals. Property assessments include the following steps:
Scoring Rubric
For our rain garden assessments, we created a scoring rubric to help quantify the suitability of a property according to a combination of factors like physical visibility, stormwater impact, soil type, ease of redirecting runoff, square footage of impervious surface, and homeowner initiative. This way, higher scoring properties can be prioritized when funds or capacity is limited. To download a copy of our scoring rubric, click here!​​
Percolation Test
As a part of our assessments, a percolation test is performed. This is a simple test to determine whether or not the soil on a given property can infiltrate rainwater within 24-48 hours.
This is important because some rain garden plants can’t withstand long periods of standing water, and if water sticks around for more than 72 hours it can breed mosquitoes.
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Some rain gardens are built with engineered soils. These require the removal of large amounts of existing soils and can be very expensive to purchase and have delivered.
If your local soils have proper infiltration this is not necessary and you can use the soils that are already on site at your property. This reduces the overall costs of building a rain garden, but also means that soil infiltration testing is an important step not to be skipped.
Measuring Impervious Surface
One of the first things we do during a property assessment is record the square footage of the roof or other impervious surfaces that will drain into the rain garden. All you’ll need is a tape measure.
Square footage can be found by multiplying the length and width of a given area. Generally, a rain garden should be about â…“ the size of the impervious surface it will be handling.
For example, if the roof area you’ll be handling is 300 square feet of impervious surface, the rain garden should be about 100 square feet.
Slope
Rain gardens are bowl shaped gardens and all sides need to be level to hold the water for infiltration. When there is a slope, an earthen berm is built to create this level bowl.
In cases of steeper slopes, a tiered rain garden system should be considered. This is a series of gardens that connect where the upper one overflows into the lower ones.
This allows the grade to be gradually stepped down with each section in the tiered system. Check out the Vermont Rain Garden Manual for guidance on how to measure slope on a given property!
Choosing Your Location
After performing these steps, it should be evident whether or not a rain garden is feasible for your site. If so, it’s time to choose your rain garden location. To learn more about this, please visit our rain gardens page.
Before beginning installation, an important step is to confirm the location of existing utilities to avoid conflicts. The national call-before-you-dig phone number is 811, or you can search their website for your state’s 811 center website.
Ordering Plants
Native plants are preferred over nonnative plants as this allows for habitat creation with a rain garden. In addition, native plants tend to have longer root systems than non-natives, thus providing more infiltration benefits.
Plants come in all sizes and can be found at local or wholesale nurseries. Many wholesale nurseries only sell to those in the landscape trade. If a community garden program is large enough, this will often meet these requirements. ​
Plant sizes used will depend on costs. Starter plugs are often cheaper, but will take time to grow and fill in. Larger potted plants will have more immediate impacts in the garden, but they’re more expensive. In general, seed is not recommended as this can take time to produce plants, and the vegetation is an important component of the rain garden function.
Plant supplies can sometimes be limited so it is good to check availability as early as possible. Wholesalers will allow plants to be reserved early in the season and ship them later.
You can also discuss with local nurseries what their supply will be and the potential to reserve plants early. It is important to make sure you have enough plants for the rain garden area. Generally, we plant 1.5 plugs per square foot.
To find out more about species selection and design, visit our rain gardens page. For a list of native plant nurseries in the Philadelphia area, click here!
Working with a Contractor
Rain gardens can easily be dug out by hand with shovels or a rented tiller. This is more easily done with a number of people and can be very cost effective.
Challenges to this approach can include removing the sod, piping the water into the garden area and disposing of the removed soil. If the garden is large, or work is too challenging for volunteers, hiring a contractor may be necessary.
This will add to the costs of building the rain garden, but contractors often have large equipment to complete the excavation and any piping that needs to be re-routed to the garden.
If a contractor is used, it is important they have knowledge and experience in the hows and whys of building a rain garden. Costs for this type of work can vary, but are generally between $1,500 and $3,000. This does not include the costs of plant material.
Rain Garden Design
Rain garden design can be formal or informal depending on what the property owner chooses. A community program can have a few people focus on the designs individually or have it be a more collaborative approach. Having new volunteers work with experienced rain garden designers is a great way to increase capacity and training.
It is also important to work with the homeowner on what their vision is for the rain garden. Some things to consider when selecting plants for your gardens are: bloom time, seasonal interest, color, height, and vantage point.
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To learn more about the rain garden design process, consider reading the Vermont Rain Garden Manual. For more information on rain gardens, design, and plant selection, visit our rain gardens page.
If you’d like guidance throughout this process, consider enrolling in the Master Rain Gardener Program. They’re a program based in Michigan which takes you step-by-step through the entire rain garden process. This program is available both in person and virtually.
Volunteers and Installation
Volunteers are the backbone of any strong community rain garden program. Everyone in our rain garden program is a volunteer, even the folks doing the design and assessment. With the guidance of an experienced rain gardener, almost anyone can help out with the installation process.
One tool we have utilized for volunteer coordination is SignUp Genius, an online platform that makes it easy to create events which anyone can sign up for. We also utilize this tool to have homeowners sign up for assessment time-slots.
One technique that sped up the process of planting plugs is the use of small portable drills fitted with a 2” auger. This tool makes digging the holes for our plugs a lot quicker and easier. Our volunteers typically work in pairs, with one person drilling and another placing plugs in the holes.
In this way, we can plant an average-size rain garden within one to two hours. This, however, only works if you are using landscaping plugs. For larger plants, a regular spade should work fine and digging should be easy as the soil should be loose from excavation. It is also helpful to have some planting knives to help loosen tight roots on plants.
​Forms
We require each homeowner to sign a homeowner agreement before we install their rain garden. This ensures their understanding that they are required to help with installation and maintain the rain garden afterward. Click here to access our landowner agreement.
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Maintenance & Follow-Up
Maintenance is an often overlooked but vitally important part of ensuring the continued functioning of your rain gardens. Throughout the first year of installation, regular weeding and watering are required until plants are fully established.​
​​Providing resources and guidance on this process to your homeowners is crucial, especially if they’re new to gardening. For information and checklists on rain garden maintenance, check out this Rhode Island DEM webpage!
You can also check out the Vermont Rain Garden Manual or our rain gardens page here. Our program volunteers are always available for follow-up questions and troubleshooting from homeowners.
In addition, after installing the rain gardens we provide homeowners with suggested watering schedules to ensure that young plants get the attention needed to survive. We routinely monitor the rain gardens we install to ensure that homeowners are maintaining their commitments and that the gardens are functioning properly.
