Jumbo jar is ready for rain

TRIB TOWN • Water-saving ideas from rural Thailand inspire park project

By Jim Redden

The Portland Tribune, Aug 28, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (6 Reader comments)

Brad Crowley works on an 800-gallon Thai Jar rainwater collector at the Woodlawn Community Garden.

JIM CLARK / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Although Brad Crowley has installed rainwater collection systems all over the Portland area, he had never built a Thai Jar until Portland Parks & Recreation asked him to install one at the Woodlawn Community Garden.

Now, after spending the past two weeks splattered with concrete and stain, Crowley has newfound respect for the traditional water supply system found throughout rural Thailand.

“This is a lot of work,” said Crowley, owner of a local company called Harvest the Sky. “Usually I’m putting plastic barrels in people’s backyards. But the Thai Jar has to built from scratch, and it’s really big.”

The garden is on property shared by Woodlawn School, located at 7200 N.E. 11th Ave., and Woodlawn Park, which wraps around the school’s southern and eastern sides.

The completed flowerpot-shape jar stands more than 6 feet tall and can hold around 800 gallons of water. It will collect water from the roof of one of the school’s nearly portable classrooms.

“It will be good for the environment because it will water the garden and feed people,” said 10-year-old Zitlaly Delera, who watched Crowley build the jar while she attended YMCA summer classes at the school.

The jar will be ceremoniously dedicated during the garden’s annual Harvest Festival, starting at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.

The jar is financed by a grant from Aveeno Active Naturals, a line of Johnson & Johnson skin-care products featuring soy, oatmeal and other natural ingredients.

The grant was part of a national campaign called Aveeno Inspires that kicked off this year at the Earth Day festival in New York City. According to company spokeswoman Monica Fish, the goal is to support community organizations that already have begun gardens and other grassroots beautification projects.

“Really, it’s about inspiring beauty,” Fish said.

Portland has program’s only jar

The garden was chosen for the project by Organic Gardening magazine through a program called Waterworks, which seeks to teach the importance of water conservation, West Coast editor Willi Galloway said.

Although 14 other cities received grants for water reclamation system, the only Thai Jar is the Portland one.

“They’re very rare in the United States, but we think they’re much more aesthetically pleasing than plastic barrels,” Galloway said. “Part of the goal in Portland was to beautify the Woodland Community Garden, so we thought it would be appropriate.”

The Thai royal government declared the jars to be an essential part of the country’s rural water resources development program in 1979. They traditionally are constructed by filling a large bag with dirt, wrapping it with chicken wire and then covering the outside with a thin layer of cement.

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