Rain gardens are attractive solutions to water problems, turning poor drainage or rain gutter runoff into a beautiful, easy-care garden showpiece. They slow down stormwater so it doesn’t run off your yard and into the street and storm sewers, helping to reduce lawn bare spots and erosion due to fast flows, all while watering your garden.
Rain gardens also filter stormwater through the soil before it flows out to storm sewers, making your local streams, ponds, and lakes cleaner. Even better, most rain gardens are low-maintenance, don’t need watering, and encourage birds, butterflies, and pollinators to visit your yard. Here’s how to make a rain garden in your yard.
What is a rain garden?
Credit: Getty / martyweil
Use plants and rocks together to help sop up excess water in your yard.
In their simplest forms, rain gardens are shallow, bowl-shaped spots or depressions in your yard planted with flowers, shrubs, or grasses that thrive in waterlogged soil and in droughts. Rainwater collects in a rain garden during storms, then gradually seeps into the soil over a day or two after the rain ends—too fast for mosquitoes to lay eggs.
Most residential rain gardens are fairly compact, ranging from 60-square-feet to 180-square-feet. They can be any shape like a straight rectangular flower bed along a walkway, a circle of flowers in a low spot in a yard, or a crescent along a slope.
What all rain gardens have in common is that they’re made of soil which drains well after a storm. If you’re planning a rain garden for the low spot in your yard where there’s always a puddle, you’re going to need to spend time digging up the soil and amending it to make the site drain faster.
How to make a rain garden
Step 1: Identify a water-logged area or low spot in your yard
Credit: Getty / Puripatch Lokakalin
A rain garden can help absorb water that pools up in low spots of your yard after a rainstorm.
Look for a site in your yard where water drains from impermeable surfaces that don’t absorb water like your roof, patio, deck, driveway, or sidewalk. Keep the rain garden at least 10-feet away from your house’s foundation so water won’t drain into your basement; you can use a gutter extension to direct water to your rain garden. Just make sure to clean your gutters regularly. Keep rain gardens away from septic systems and tall trees which might get their roots damaged.
Step 2: Test the soil and add extra nutrients as …….
Source: https://www.reviewed.com/home-outdoors/features/how-to-make-a-rain-garden