OWLA's Rain Garden Initiative
OWLA works to expand rain garden and native plant projects to build awareness of stewardship issues in the Owasco Watershed. Our projects are volunteer built using a small grant to procure plant materials and garden supplies. We are looking for new volunteers and welcome your involvement.
How we Started
In October 2021, OWLA and our partners the Owasco Lake Watershed Management Council and Cayuga County Parks & Trails launched our first rain garden project in Emerson Park.
Using a 1000 square foot area in a wet and difficult to maintain location along the Owasco Lake outlet, our volunteers planted approximately 100 wet area loving native plants in a shallow water holding basin - creating a rain garden.
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How we Grew
In 2023, OWLA received a grant from the Metcalf & French Foundations to expand our rain garden project to more broadly include native plant and classroom projects.
The grant supported materials for going into schools and building winter seedling frames with 150 7th grade science students, establishing a seedling garden at the Ward O'Hara Agricultural Museum at Emerson Park, creating an educational garden sign, planting a native plant garden along the pavilion at Fillmore Glen State Park, and starting a small trial to test sowing native plant seed in a ditch remediation project.
Our volunteer group is continually working establish additional rain garden and native garden projects in the Owasco Watershed.
There are a number of reasons:
Watershed Stewardship
Planting natives provides an opportunity for all of us to become watershed stewards. Rain gardens hold storm runoff, filter pollutants, and reduce sediment and nutrient pollution into the lake after increasingly more frequent heavy rainfall events. This is a small step toward protecting water quality, and perhaps a bigger step toward recognizing we all need to make changes is needed if we are to keep our lake.
Best Practices
Native plants by their nature require no fertilizer or pesticide support to thrive. Native plants evolved in our region and are adapted to soil, water, climate, and other living species. Since whatever materials we use in a watershed eventually reaches the lake, eliminating or reducing fertilizer and pesticide use in a watershed protects water quality.
Natural Benefits
Native species provide natural beauty unique to our region's flora. Incorporating native species into our gardens enhances plant diversity. This helps continue the existence of local species in the wild world that depend on native plants.
Pollinator Pathways
Native plants attract a variety of pollinator butterfly and other insect species. There is an active movement nationwide to plant pollinator pathways to support these species, some of which are endangered.
About our Rain Garden Design
For a 20'x50' area in Emerson Park, we started our rain garden project using:
- 100 native plants of 10 species which we planted in groups or masses (see plant list below).
- A naturalistic design or layout (anything other than straight lines or geometric patterns works great), or a pattern of kidney bean shaped groups of plants set approximately 2 to 2 1/2 feet apart. When mature, the plants will fill in most of the garden area and make a low maintenance garden.
- Cardboard (broken down boxes) and wood chip mulch to suppress weeds around the plants while they mature;
- No fertilizer or pesticide needed, watering the young plants during droughty conditions is helpful while the plants are young
- Over the following two years we doubled the garden area
Thank you to our Supporters
- Auburn Junior High School
- Cayuga County Parks & Trails
- Cornell Botanic Garden
- Cornell Cooperative Extension of Cayuga County
- Friends of Emerson Park
- Friends of Fillmore Glen Go Native! perennials
- Ward O'Hara Agricultural Museum
- The Plantsmen Nursery
- The Stanley W. Metcalf And D. E. French Foundations
- The Owasco Lake Watershed Management Council
- Tyburn Academy
- Fillmore Glen State Park
- Wegmans
The Owasco Watershed Lake Association (OWLA) works to protect the lake and its watershed. OWLA educates the community about Owasco Lake and ways to protect that surface freshwater - freshwater we all use everyday.
