Rain Gardens - For Kingswood -- See our Garden Page here!

Maintaining a healthy yard is important to most residents in the Athens area. Over half of a group surveyed in a follow-up poll for the Clean Water Campaign in the Atlanta area said that they maintain their own lawns. However, your yard may not be as "green" as you think. Excess fertilizer and pesticides can wash off lawns when it rains and into a nearby storm drains and streams.

Here are some tips for you to follow when maintaining your lawn that prevent water pollution while keeping a yard green.


Why Plant a Rain Garden?

Every time it rains, fertilizers, pesticides, debris and other pollutants wash across lawns and driveways and down streets into the nearest storm drain. From there they go directly into a river, lake or stream. Over 800 miles of stream are polluted in metro Atlanta. Most of that pollution comes from stormwater runoff. Planting a rain garden reduces pollution while giving you a garden that is easy to maintain and needs little or no watering.

About Rain Gardens

Planting a rain garden on your property is one way to conserve water, reduce your monthly water bill and help protect our waterways at the same time. All that is needed is some basic information, a little imagination and the space on your property to build a rain garden.

How Rain Gardens Work

A rain garden receives stormwater runoff water from roofs or other hard surfaces such as driveways. The rain garden holds the water on the landscape so that it can soak into the ground instead of flowing into a street and down a storm drain. The plants, mulch and soil in a rain garden combine natural physical, biological and chemical processes to remove pollutants from runoff.

An effective rain garden depends on water infiltrating into the soil of the garden. Water should stand in a rain garden no longer than 24 hours after the rain stops. Mosquitos cannot complete their breeding cycle in this length of time, so the rain garden should not increase mosquito populations at all.

How to Create a Rain Garden

Constructing a rain garden is easy, but it requires lots of shovel work when built by hand. Use the assistance of others to prepare and plant your rain garden. Teamwork reduces the amount of time it takes to construct a rain garden. It can be created alone, but if neighbors and friends are asked to join then they can learn the “hands on” value of a rain garden. The main steps to creating a rain garden in your yard can be found at the bottom of the following link. For more info about Rain Gardens and how to Create one, click here!

Did you know??? Only 55 percent of the 70,150 miles of Georgia's streams support a full range of aquatic life. Sadly, 16 percent support no aquatic life at all.