Welcome to our Rain Gardens Page

This Rain Garden Manual is a dream come into reality for the NPSNJ. Our manual features key steps in the process that will allow you to install a rain garden either at your home, community, or schoolyard. You will eNJoy the low maintenance and beauty once the plants are mature.

Click here for FREE download of New Jersey’s Rain Garden Manual in two sections:

Download Part 1 - pdf 800K

Download Part 2 - pdf 1000K

After downloading the manual:

• If you have questions about installing a rain garden at your school, please contact Kathy Salisbury, Director of Horticulture Greater Newark Conservancy: email: ksalisbury@citybloom.org

• If you have questions about installing a rain garden at your home contact Isaac Martin: email: shiloh021@yahoo.com

The NJ Native Plant Society very much encourages educators to become involved in the NJ DEP Division of Fish & Wildlife's Wild School Sites program.

WILD School Sites helps students and teachers learn about the importance of biodiversity, understand the basic steps of creating a wildlife habitat, develop a plan for action, and gain community support. The goal of this program is to assist educators and students in taking responsible action to improve their communities for people and wildlife--beginning on their school grounds. The program supports NJ's Curriculum Content Standards.

The Homes for Wildlife supplemental curriculum guide is a "recipe book" for how to create, enhance, or maintain schoolyard habitats. The guide offers the A to Z of habitat measuring and mapping, sun/shade studies, wildlife inventory, and 2D and 3D methods of landscape design.

The program is offered as a 6 hour teacher training workshop that emphasizes hands-on participatory design techniques and fosters service-learning throughout the process.

"The journey is important, not the destination"

In this way, teachers with students can create rain gardens to save water, enhance the environment and gain a practical knowledge of how to make a project work for the long term. This program also provides an avenue for much needed financial assistance to schools.

Under the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP), NRCS provides technical and financial assistance for creating, enhancing and maintaining wildlife habitat on school grounds.

For more information about WILD School Sites & Schoolyard Habitats contact:

Liz Jackson
Pequest Trout Hatchery
605 Pequest Road
Oxford, NJ 07863
email: Liz.Jackson@dep.state.nj.us www.nj.gov/dep/seeds/schhabs.htm

The NPSNJ is able to provide this resource due to many hours of volunteer time and a generous grant from The Watershed Institute.