2.5K Views 2 years ago

How to Build a Rain Garden and Why You Might Want to

Author Bio

Jonathon Engels, a long-time vegetarian turned vegan, is currently on a trip from Guatemala to... Read More

For some of us, like those living in Arizona and California, lack of water is a major problem. But, many of us have the opposite issue. Climate change is making the rain come more often and harder than we’ve ever known. Our lovely gardens and lawns are becoming soggy messes for much of the year. Who wants that?

While it would be easy to get negative about the whole thing, it’s also possible to think of all these extra inches of rain as something with potential. Rather than trying to thwart nature with drainage ditches in what’s sure to be a losing battle, life (and your yard) might be more interesting with a rain garden.

Rain gardens are being utilized in urban and suburban areas with a lot of hard surfaces— roofs, roads, sidewalks— causing trouble with storm runoff. These gardens, like floodplains, are very effective at capturing the water and allowing it to soak into the landscape rather than create erosion problems and pollute our natural waterways.

Luckily, building a rain garden can be a lot of fun, and there are good reasons for doing one wherever you may live.

What exactly is a rain garden?

A rain garden is a garden designed to capture water and hold it for a while so that it can soak into the soil as opposed to being drained away. Unlike a normal flowerbed, a rain garden is cultivated with plants that enjoy a boggy environment, choosing the plant based on the situation rather than creating a garden bed to suit the plants’ needs.

Rain gardens are best located in places where water already tends to congregate and pool in the yard. Instead of trying to drain the wet spot, one might install additional channels and slopes to encourage rainwater to the spot. The trick is creating enough of a depression in the landscape to capture the runoff and create a directed overflow route if the rains get too heavy.

The idea here is that the area will get very wet, even puddle up for a while sometimes, but ultimately the earth and plants will absorb the excess water, utilizing it instead of making the flooding problem worse downstream.

Why you might want to make a rain garden

In the developed world, our inclination is often to attempt to overpower and control nature with our machinery and engineering. Just often this is a battle we lose. Levees break. Storm drains back up. Beachfront buildings start to sink. Suffice it to say that water is incredibly powerful and equally persistent. It generally wins out over time.

That’s why it makes more sense to try to work with it and utilize it wherever it wants to go. Rain gardens are a clever way of doing this. Instead of fighting to push water this way or that, we simply encourage it to go where it seems to want to be. Then, we allow it to stay as long as it wants.

In return, we can make amazing wetland gardens and grow all sorts of plants that might not otherwise hang around with us. For those edible landscapers, this includes a host of food-producing plants such as cranberries, fox grapes, mint, blackberries, taro, Aronia (berries), elderberries, duck potatoes, and rushes.

How to Make a Rain Garden

There are a few things to consider before digging into this project. For example, the garden should be away from the house (about 10 feet) so that it doesn’t cause damage to the foundation. It should also be located in a sensible place, either utilizing where water already goes or intercepting flows of water such as from gutters or down the driveway on their way elsewhere. And, it’s important to call the power company and so on to mark out any lines you might hit with a shovel.

The rain garden should be where potential overflow water slopes away from important structures. Filling the expanded water-harvesting depression (12-18” deep at the most) with stones can help to speed infiltration, and adding plenty of compost and mulch will help with absorbing the water and keeping things moist in drier periods. Remember the rain garden plants like to be in wet soils.

Lastly, be sure to add cool features so that it’s something all the more interesting to look at. It should have cool rocks if they are available. There can be an old log rotting away to provide good habitat. Add a birdbath or birdhouse. Play around.

The rain garden will be something that is both highly functional for the house and community, as well as a beautiful feature for your property.

Being publicly-funded gives us a greater chance to continue providing you with high-quality content.Click here to Support Us