In our third year of organizing volunteer work in rain gardens, we coordinated 38 service workdays and brought the total number of volunteer stewards to 104. These stewards work in rain gardens that are on schoolyards, curbside or in parks. In the City of Ann Arbor, the parks and rec department's GIVE 365 helped organize six workdays at Garden Homes park, Veteran's Memorial Park, Arbor Oaks Park, Hunt Park and West Park. Natural Area Preservation helped organize one volunteer workday along Miller Ave and in Miller Park.
In addition to the usual maintenance work, we also built seven new rain gardens in the Swift Run neighborhood and completely replanted three large rain gardens in Veteran's Memorial Park and Garden Homes park. About 10,000 plants were planted with these projects!
This year we built two new schoolyard rain gardens, one at Estabrook Elementary School in Ypsilanti and another at Huron High School in Ann Arbor. A special thank you to the volunteers who helped with the hard work of grading these rain gardens and to the volunteers who spend countless hours watering and weeding the brand new gardens. With the help of teachers, parents and students, we also transplanted plants to fill in the Bach Elementary School and King Elementary School rain gardens.
2018 has been a productive and fun filled field season. Thank you to everyone who has donated their time and energy to tending to our rain gardens, attending nature walks and helping manage groups of kiddos planting new plants.