Allan Appel Photo
Water will enter the garden’s “splash pad” on the left, rather than the storm drain on the right.
Plant wintergreen, spice bush, and beach plums.
Add blueberries, of both the high bush and low bush varieties. Lingonberries and bearberries.
(Who knew there were so many berries?)
All will emerge ready to eat or brew into aromatic teas this spring, thanks to a newly remade 850 square-foot section of a Fair Haven parking lot.
Save The Sound Watershed Coordinator Nicole Davis.
The above-mentioned plants are part of Connecticut Fund for the Environment-Save the Sound‘s first edible rain garden to be built in Fair Haven.
It’s right behind the branch library off Grand Avenue and adjacent to the New Haven Land Trust’s vegetabale garden.
Thursday afternoon volunteers and staffers from the two organizations were on hand to plant the plants and lay in the mulch —and cut a blue, or rather, green ribbon.
The H20-friendly edible plants in the garden will be kept alive and nourished all winter long thanks to the whoosh of rain rater swept into their beds and trenches from the parking lot. That will save all that water from flooding into the nearby storm drain of the sewer system.
That’s the theory and practice of rain gardens, which provide nourishment to edible plants.
The group’s watershed coordinator, Nicole Davis, said the group has already installed 16 “inedible” rain gardens — basically larger-sized cousins of bioswales — this year, largely on individual properties in the West River neighborhood.
Save the Sound’s rain gardens complement 200-plus bioswales, either already installed or on the way, that are turning New Haven into a rain-capturing mecca.
Fair Haven’s new edible rain garden is only the second in the city; the first was installed on Rosette Street in the Hill. The Rosette Street garden channels water from the downspout of a residence adjacent to the community garden.
Fair Haven’s is the first to make you feel a little positive about a parking lot.
Morrison and Angelica with some of the bounty of the nearby vegetable garden
Volunteers such as Yale junior Aaron Kleiner and Notre Dame High School student Brian Paulis dug holes and laid in some of the wintergreen along the slopes of the trench Thursday. Meanwhile, Davis explained that when it rains, the trench fills with water. Instead of drowning, the plants flourish, she said, and tuck the moisture away for drier periods ahead.
A reporter asked about the large pieces of gravel in the chute beside the curb cut.
“When the water comes in, it’s got velocity,” and the gravel slows it down for better distribution, Davis responded. Smaller gravel would tend to compact and do a poorer job of slowing the water down.
The chute, which is technically called a “splash pad,” intercepts plastic and other debris that otherwise might go down the storm drain.
Allen on splash pad, beside storm drain.
“It tries to restore storm water treatment the way nature wants to do it, soft, green infrastructure,” said Save the Sound Ecological Communications Specialist Anthony Allen.
The garden is self-watering. That was good news to Lisa Angelica, a garden designer who has also been a regular volunteer at the nearby vegetable garden. She came over to check on the rain garden’s progress.
She and the other gardeners worked with the Save the Sound staffers in selecting the plants being put in, to complement the raspberries and blackberries that the group had already begun to grown there.
Davis with volunteer Aaron Kleiner and the winterberry.
Allen and Davis both emphasized that the choice of location for a rain garden includes a nearby combined sewer system, so that the garden can help mitigate problematic overflows
Another key factor is the presence of an ongoing group, such as the Fair Haven Library/New Haven Land Trust’s, who can be stewards of the rain garden. And an excited and committed lead gardener, such as Angelica, Allen added.
The cost of plant purchases and hiring a contractor to put in the curb cut from the parking lot were covered by a grant from the Greater New Haven Green Fund.
Land Trust Community Gardens Manager Bradley Fleming maneuvered his pick-up close to the trench and began to drop some of the four cubic yards of mulch — all contributed from the cities’ parks — so the volunteers could spread it among the plants.
Nearby Angelica and the Fair Haven Branch Librarian Kirk Morrison looked on approvingly. Then she handed him a bowl full of dinosaur kale, collards, and Swiss chard that had just been harvested from the garden.