Oak Park Unified School District entered an agreement with the County of Ventura Sept. 26, to construct a new watershed-friendly garden at Oak Park High School.

The new garden, located between the R and E buildings, is being built over a tank that collects runoff water from rain and irrigation. The collected water will then be reused for irrigation purposes across campus, reducing the amount of water the school uses.

“You’ll see there is a drain [in the garden] and the water will drain [into the tank]. It is trapped and then is funneled back into the recycling,” Buchanan said. “So all our watering around here is all done with what is called gray water — it’s recycled water. It is perfectly fine for watering gardens and plants.”

The new garden is still in its early stages of being built.

“It’s a model of a watershed garden that’s in construction,” Buchanan said.

According to Buchanan, Oak Park is an important watershed area — all the water that is used runs down to Medea Creek, then to Malibu Lagoon.

When Oak Park residents grow their own gardens, Buchanan said, fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides get mixed in with the water that runs through the gardens, ultimately polluting the lagoon.

“If there’s too much fertilizer in the water, in the creeks, it creates algae bloom, and algae blooms choke off the the oxygen to all the life in there and essentially kills all the life,” Buchanan said.

To counteract this problem, Oak Park, in conjunction with the Ventura County Public Works  Agency, is spreading awareness of the issue and encouraging more Oak Park residents to create their own watershed-friendly gardens.

“Ventura County Public Works Agency wants to do some outreach into the community to try and get people to understand that they can have gardens that are friendly to the watershed,” Buchanan said.

Additionally, the Ventura County Public Works Agency is educating community members on the benefits of implementing watershed-friendly gardens in residential areas.

“They’re running a series of classes in the Pavilion on how people do this,” Buchanan said. “[They explain] how do you do it in your own garden, where you create a beautiful garden without using pesticides, without using herbicides, how you create the geography.”

With the creation of Oak Park’s I building during the summer of 2014, Oak Park had already begun implementing similar watershed-friendly initiatives on campus.

“Any water that lands on that path [across from the I building], it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s captured [in an underground tank] and then it will go back into the recycling system, and then be reused to water the grass. So we don’t allow the water to just run off; plus, we don’t use pesticides and don’t use herbicides,” Buchanan said.