If Not a Rain Garden, Then What?

Ellerbe Creek restoration 1st year after completion.

Ellerbe Creek restoration in 3+ year. (same location as picture 1)

As you can see from the above pictures, this very expensive stream renovation done by the Army Corp of Engineers a few years ago is deteriorating.  

One of the reasons this is happening is because intermittent streams and storm water run-off system pipes dump large quantities of water into the creek after a rain event from the surrounding urban neighborhood.

At the most recent Durham District 2 Partners Against Crime meeting, the condition of the 'No Mow' zone around the restored creek was criticized for it's impact on safety in our park that this creek runs through.  Summer brings a tangle of head high weeds in addition to young trees and shrubs planted to help stabilize the creeks banks.  Parents in the neighborhood are deeply concerned about the safety of their children near this wild area.  They question whether it is safe to let children play in the surrounding areas play ground because they cannot see what's lurking in the undergrowth.  A large portion of the park's play areas had to be sacrificed to create these 'No Mow' buffers so play spaces have become much smaller.

Again, I would like to remind everyone that part  of this problem could have been mitigated by the installation of more rain gardens in the surrounding neighborhood.

Why would this have any relevance to you if you don't live in this neighborhood you may ask?  And the answer is there is always someone that lives downstream from everybody.  There will always be a community struggling with meeting the demand for clean water with a water source that has developed poor water quality and requires expensive, expansive fixes.

Much work needs to be done to design creek and stream restorations through urban areas that are compatible with the neighborhoods.  

But perhaps we could start lending a hand by installing rain gardens in our yards and solving a small part of the problem.  We all need to provide input to community officials about new ideas and solutions that emphasize partnerships.

Fall Clean-ups for your Rain Garden

If your rain garden is situated near large trees, you're probably wondering what to do about all those leaves in the rain garden.  I am often asked if it's okay to leave them there.  My answer is
no. 

Although you may wish to add a layer of composted leaves as a top dressing to help nourish your rain garden plants, it's not a good idea to let a heavy build-up of leaves accumulate.  Many low growing sedums and other ground cover plants will be blocked from receiving winter sunlight if leaves have piled up over them.

So what is the best way to rid the rain garden of the leaves?  Since many of the sedums and creeping jenny that make such wonderful ground covers would be damaged by raking, I recommend the use of a leaf blower.  This removes the leaves to be collected and taken to the compost pile.  Many find leaf blower noises to be annoying and that would include me but they safely remove unwanted items without damaging your other plants.  They also give your back, arms and shoulders a break from the constant raking motion.

There are both gas powered and electric varieties to choose from and some allow you to dial the force of the air up and down.  A light weight electric type with the variable air force mechanism would be my best choice.  Good sources are Home Depot, Lowes and other large home improvement stores for the best selection.  Don't rule out checking your locally owned garden center as they may provide excellent advice as well as the product you need.

Decorative Grasses in the Rain Garden

Fall is upon us and soon we'll be settling into the winter weather season.  If your rain garden functions both as a storm water retention site and a decorative feature of your yard, you'll be looking at the grasses and wondering what to do.

By now, most grasses in USDA zones 5, 6 and even 7A have turned brown or beige.  Frosts have stopped the production of chlorophyll in the grass blades and they have died to ground level turning brown in the process.  Here in the Piedmont, our grasses are just beginning the color change that will last through winter.  The brown to beige grasses are quite interesting as they sway with each bit of winter wind.  I consider them one of the more attractive features of my winter rain garden.

So now is not the time to cut them back while tidying up the garden.  At the base of each grass blade is a tiny tube from which the grass blades sprout in spring.  Think of this tube as a straw.  Think of winter snows and rain running down into this straw and soaking into the roots.

I'm sure many of you have seen clumps of grasses with the center of the clump gone.  This is because the roots in that area have rotted out.  New growth forms around edges causing the 'ring' of grass you sometimes see.

Grasses should be trimmed back in early spring.  Since each variety comes out of dormancy at a slightly different time, you will need to check the clumps during your winter garden inspections and look for the tiny new green shoots emerging.  I usually cut back all of our grasses during February in North Carolina when the new shoots are about two inches in height.  If you wait too late in the spring, you risk chopping the tops out of this summers grass display.

Be sure to use sharp pruners and wear long sleeves and gloves when cutting back the clumps.  The dry brittle blades can irritate skin.

Enough technical info for today.  

Look for my next post that describes my hike through the Glenstone Preserve and information about the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Associations good work in promoting clean water and healthy creeks, streams and lakes.

Cheryl

The King's Daughters Inn 3 Year Old Rain Garden

The Maturing Rain Garden

It hardly seems that only three years ago there was a gaping hole in the front yard of the Inn.  A picture from my Rain Garden Handbook shows one gallon plants in plastic pots sitting atop the soil mix, ready to be planted.  Now, we enjoy the seasonal colors of blue indigo, hosta, siberian iris and especially the fantastic show of late summer grasses in bloom.

Our job now with this rain garden?  Keep windblown weed seeds from establishing and choking out our intended plant mix, and one unexpected mutation of a variegated hybrid reverting back to it's plain leaf form and spreading like crazy.  But Mother Nature is full of surprises so we dutifully get on hands and knees and dig roots of the unwanted invader.  

Beyond those small maintenance tasks, we can take pad and pencil and multiply the number of inches of rain by the capacity of our rain garden.  We humbly congratulate ourselves on the fact that in it's three year existence, this garden has diverted nearly 920,000 gallons of rain water from the overburdened storm water system of our City of Durham.  

Downtown areas with their large expanses of impervious surfaces create huge volumes of storm water runoff.  For us in Durham, this runoff is dumped mainly into a tributary of the Ellerbe Creek.  The Inn's location adjacent to downtown helps mitigate part of the volume of water from storm events.  

Thank you Colin and Deanna Crossman for the foresight and commitment to be a pioneer in new storm water management practices.

Rain Garden Celebrates Ten Years of Rain Water Collection

Just for the fun of it, I decided to look up precipitation amounts for the last ten years that we have had a rain garden.  I wanted to determine just what kind of impact our little 'garden' was actually making on preventing polluted run-off and preservation of waterways.

IT'S OFFICIAL!  From 2002 until October of 2012, our rain garden has diverted 210,000 gallons of water from entering our city's storm water system.  Add to that another 100,000 gallons that accumulated in our rain barrels and we have a grand total of 310,000 gallons of rain water.  The rain garden water has been properly filtered and entered the water table cleaned and ready for reuse. The rain barrel water went directly to thirsty plants that didn't seem to mind the lack of filtered quality.

We also used the rain barrel water to fill our water gardens. Fish don't do well in chemically treated water so turning on the tap is never an option.

Now if we can just convince more neighbors how big an impact is possible, we can make a difference.

If your state allows the collection of rain water, please consider how you can do your part in protecting the precious 2% of all our planets water that is actually consumable.  The other 98% forms our oceans and requires desalinization to be potable or used for irrigation purposes at considerable expense because of the energy needed to complete the process.

Tell me how many gallons of rain water you are able to save in your rain garden.  Remember, 1000 square feet of impervious surface with one inch of rain will yield aprox. 638 gallons of rain water.

Who says storm water management can't be pretty?

                                    Mums and Grasses flower in the October rain garden.

I went out to collect branches blown down in the latest cold front induced wind storm and happened to glance over at the rain garden.  The sun was in it's early afternoon position and shining at that perfect slant that makes colors so vibrant and shadows so interesting.

Last fall I had basically thrown the Chrysanthemums from our porch planter into the soil to see if I could keep them from freezing and ending up in the compost heap.  I love this coppery-red one and thought if it could survive, it would make a nice addition to the fall rain garden look.  Low and behold, the mums love the fast draining soil blend so don't rot out in winter like those planted in the other parts of our gardens.  

The cheery yellow blossoms are one of those happy windblown seed surprises that came from the Ellerbe Creek stream restoration across the street.  When the seedlings first popped up in spring, I thought I recognized the little leaves and decided to let them grow for the summer to see what they would become.

Nature is never static.  Ever evolving, plants either flourish or slowly dwindle away to non-existence.  I love this year's transformation of co-habitation by our plant families.

The Rain Garden Handbook now available as a Kindle Book

After 10 years of answering questions about rain gardens, I decided to write a book about them.  The questions came after my husband Michael and I created a rain garden in our yard.  Although other states had already created websites about the techniques of rain gardening, our state of North Carolina had yet to introduce information about them.  So we answered questions.  Lot's of them.  If you Google rain garden, you will see that today their are over 300,000 and climbing entries on the subject.

Most often asked questions were: What is a rain garden? Does it have fish in it?  And will it attract mosquitoes? 

It took two years to write the book and another year to get it properly edited and determine the best ways to market it.  I must confess, the last year could have been smoother if I knew as much about computers, software and the internet.  But then, I'm a gardener.

I wanted to provide the information about rain gardens in the most eco-friendly way possible.  In other words, I didn't want to cut down trees and produce hundreds of copies that would need to be shipped to folks, which required the use of other natural resources to deliver to door steps.

In the future, The Rain Garden Handbook will also be available as a Google electronic download to computers and as a last resort, a printed version will be available through 'My Space' for those not comfortable with Kindle or electronic versions or that don't have the ability to purchase in that manner.  I'll get to providing those options if future months and keep you posted when they are available.

For those looking for the Kindle version look for the following picture with the title:

The Rain Garden Handbook, Creating a Garden that Captures Rain Water

I hope this book helps inspire thousands of people to create rain gardens in their yards and by doing so helping to protect our waterways and water supplies.

Look to this blog for a history of our rain garden and how the whole project got started.

Please comment on the posts and ask questions about your own rain garden or the desire to create one.

It's started to rain here.  Think I'll go watch the rain garden for awhile.

It's 'Big Sweep' Day

This month and especially today, people in North Carolina are walking along river and creek banks, lake shores and cleaning up the trash.  You might wonder how this is related to rain gardens but consider it a partner plan that addresses other ways that our water becomes difficult to treat for human consumption. Imagine a creek filled with rusting cans, broken glass, plastic grocery bags, automotive parts and other machinery. Eventually metal tanks that contain oil or gasoline rupture allowing these toxic chemicals to mix with the water.

Then also imagine a wild creature cutting it's foot on the glass, becoming caught in the trash and drowning during a storm event or having the plastic wrapped around a creature's mouth so that is unable to eat or drink.  These are gruesome scenarios but preventing them is another way to help take care of our Mother Earth and her creatures.

Yes, it's hard work to crawl around in a creek and drag a rusting bicycle or automotive tire out during clean-ups.  Everyone isn't physically capable for this level of exertion.  But then again, you can put that rain garden in your yard to help. Once it's established just watch it work it's magic.   You can put rain barrels at the corners of your house and catch the run-off to later be used to water trees, gardens or other plants rather than turning on the tap.

I'd love to hear other folks ideas for protecting our water supplies.   Comment or drop me an email to tell me what you're doing.

Cheryl

A backyard rain garden or a storm water containment area, it's your choice

As I look across the street at the jungle that was once the sloping banks of the Ellerbe Creek, I wish that I could have looked into the future to see what the proposed 'stream restoration' was going to look like.
Promises of maintenance, benches for viewing the wetland, signage for education are all remembered but completely lacking.

As my post title suggests, you can make it your personal responsibility to contain the rain water that falls on your property or allow nature to take it's course and wash it all down hill to damage creeks, streams, rivers and lakes.  If you choose the latter, the government will intervene to solve the problem and as in so many cases, you will end up with a solution that doesn't fit your neighborhood or add to your quality of life.

Right now no one would want to sit and gaze at the jumble of native wildflowers, grasses, shrubs and trees that completely block the view of the creek and poze a safety issue for those walking the paths around it.  Low pockets in the constructed wetland areas hold water where mosquitoes breed.  They are not constantly filled so that the possibility of having fish and other aquatic creatures to eat the mosquito larvae is nil.

But my rain garden takes it's 1300 gallons of rainwater with each one inch of rain that falls, filters it through the special soil my rain garden plants grow in and eventually allows it to percolate through the subsoil layers and return to the water table perfectly clean.

This problem is becoming more prevalent in many parts of the country as fast growing cities must supply their inhabitents with clean drinking water.  If it hasn't happened yet in your area, wait and listen for the comments when drought ocurrs, reservoirs develop water quality problems and flooding becomes more widespread.

Like I said, it's your choice.

Contacting me through my email scjdurham@aol.com

This blog is really the ALIVE part of my rain garden experiences and the place you'll find the most information about living with a raingarden, solving raingarden problems and following my thoughts on what we're doing here on Earth to our usable water supply.  If you have specific questions they will be answered most quickly by emailing me at scjdurham@aol.com, an email address I check daily or almost daily unless I'm traveling and out of range.  You can also make comments on my Blog.

Drop me a line and let me know if you find my posts helpful and also suggest any topics about your raingarden you'd like me to address.

Cheryl Shiflett

Raingardenhandbook website is now inactive

For several years I've had a website 'Raingardenhandbook.com that was hosted by a small local company.  This company has gone out of business and my website is gone including the link to my Raingarden Blog.  It was a fine tool to learn about me and purchase my book via a pass-through to Paypal.

I have since had my book re-edited to a Kindle Book version and also will make it available for purchase through Amazon as an Ebook.  Look for purchase opportunities beginning in September.

You can still follow the life of my rain garden through my blog that is updated on a regular basis.  Reach my blog by googling raingardenblog.blogspot and look for my name in the description, Cheryl Shiflett.  Do not click on any entries that include the old website address of raingardenhandbook.com.

Since only 2% of the world's water is in a drinkable form, it is imperative that we treat our Mother Earth with care and safeguard our waterways and ground water supplies.  I will continue to promote better practices for handling our storm water (rain water) and discussing practices that can contaminate our ground water resource.

Cheryl Shiflett

Spiderwort in the Rain Garden on July 27th, 2012

Our maintenance chore is shown above.  Having performed beautifully in spring, this spiderwort has completed it's bloom cycle and now the browned out stems can be removed.  Next spring tiny shoots will emerge to become the two foot beauty that blooms for many weeks and adds a nice contrast to the red drooping bell-shaped blooms of the wild columbine.

Rain Garden Problems - The Maintenance Issue

Everything in nature is constantly changing and so it goes even with a rain garden.  If you've ever planted a vegetable garden and then left it to fend for itself, you quickly discover that dormant seeds in the soil have sprouted and a variety of plants you hadn't intended to compete with your vegetables are thriving.  After a matter of weeks these intruders may choke out your tomatoes, beans and everything else you planted.

This same problem will ocurr in landscaped beds and any type of garden.  Maintenance will always be required.

The key to keeping your rain garden as weed free as possible is learning to recognize seedlings from your intended plants from whatever else has popped up.  In my book, The Rain Garden Handbook, a picture of tiny Baptisia australis (wild blue indigo) seedlings peek from under a larger Aquilegia Canadensis (wild columbine).  Although very small, the tiny leaves are easy to recognize as being similar to those of the mother plant.  These seedlings should be left to grow as they were intended to be part of your rain garden.

On the other hand, if you don't recognize the tiny leaves, pull the seedling.  I generally fill an aluminum bucket several times during the spring season ridding my rain garden of unwanted  plant species that the wind may have blown in or were dormant in the soil when I first created the garden.

Another problem can ocurr when a hybrid variety of, as an example, Houttuynia cordata 'Variegata' reverts back to the original form.  This ocurred in one of my clients gardens and the plain green-leaved variety began taking over the whole rain garden.  The only remedy was to dig every root of the plain green-leaved variety and add it to the compost pile.  If left to continue spreading, it would have choked out the Hosta, Siberian Iris, Liriope and everything else that was not as vigorous a grower.

Another maintenance issue is replacing plants that have died.  If you don't cover the ground with another preferred plant, then Mother Nature will and it will be her choice.  I found that the Lobelia cardinalis, all twelve of them, were devoured by tiny green worms and by the third year they didn't pop up in the spring at all.  I found a variety of sedum to fill some of the bare spots and the wild columbines had seeded into the other spots.  The rain garden was again filled with plants that were attractive and suitable to the existing conditions.

Keeping fallen leaves from accumulating in the fall months is also a necessary chore.  If allowed to build up, they can smother the plants you designed to be there.  A leaf blower is preferable to a rake in this instance so that delicated ground covers are not ripped from the soil as you clean.

Other maintenance chores would be removing stems that have performed their purpose and now are 'brown and down' in the garden. Tradescantia (spiderwort) is famous for this dissappearing trick.  It's lavendar to purple blooms continue for many weeks in spring but then as the heat of summer sets in, the stems begin to yellow and droop, finally lying on the ground in pitiful looking strings.  These can be cut and removed to the compost pile. 

Other maintenance issues will be discussed in their season of occurence.

Look for problems related to the installation of your rain garden next post.

Cheryl

Avoiding problems with your rain garden

In my last post, I mentioned finding many google topics involving problems with rain gardens.  It's not surprising that it took a few years for these situations to creep up as rain gardens were not put to use until about ten years ago.  There has been a learning curve and it will continue.

Three main issues contribute to a rain garden's functionality problems.  They are:

- Poor design
-Poor maintenance
-Poor initial contruction

We'll talk about the poor design aspect today.

The depth, width and length of your rain garden must create a depression large enough to handle the volume of water you would expect from a normal rain event.   To determine these measurements,  you  must know the rate at which water will perk or pass through your yards soil type.  Even though you will be excavating a depression that you'll fill with a special rain garden soil mix, the underlying and surrounding soil are going to influence how quickly water passes on down through subsequent layers of sub soil and into soil areas surrounding your rain garden. 

If we assume you have a sandy loam soil, water will pass through that soil in a matter of hours given a normal rain event.  This allows you to dig a deeper depression with less surface area (width & length).  Keep in mind we want the standing water gone within 24 to 48 hours maximum.  You should be taking into consideration what square footage of impervious surface you are draining to this rain garden.  Unless your house is quite small, it is doubtful that you'll be mitigating the rain water from more than a portion, perhaps one side of a roof.  Every run off solution makes a small contribution to the overall problem so don't be dissappointed that you can't contain all your storm water.

If we assume that you have a heavy clay soil, water may take many days to pass through sub soil layers if it drains at all.  In this case, the portion of impervious surface you can drain to your garden will be smaller and your rain garden will be much shallower and have a larger surface area.  You'll probably want to increase the sand percentage of your soil mix.  You won't encounter mosquito problems from standing water if all the water is actually down within the sand, compost, soil mix.  A combination of evaporation and plant root water uptake will eliminate the rain water that was contained in your rain garden eventually.

Size isn't the only design issue that can cause problems.  If the edge of the rain garden slopes off too steeply, you may not be retaining the rain water but merely slowing it down as it moves downhill.  Make sure that the edge of the garden is high enough to prevent the water from running in and then right back out.  You want to keep that water in the rain garden.

If you are just now considering the use of a rain garden in your yard, careful research will help to avoid  making mistakes in your overall design.  It's easier and less costly to do it right than to do it over.

We'll save the discussions on maintenance and installation problems for future posts.

Gardening is much easier to learn than computing

Today is July 23rd, 2012 and I have finally been able to access my blog to post again.  I've had 'technical' difficulties since October of 2011.  Since that time, the number of entries when raingardens is googled has multiplied by 300%!  I see raingarden problem entries.  There are websites about what problems might occur and how raingardens might not be the answer.

We are going to explore some of these issues in upcoming posts.  It really isn't rocket science but just like baking a cake, if you get the proportions or ingredients wrong, the thing flops.

Look for more discussions about creating a raingarden that solves your rainwater collection goals without creating problems.

Cheryl