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| Rain garden all staked out |
I finished the design for the rain garden a few weeks ago, and the city came out and staked the area shortly after that. Once that was all done, we were finally able to start digging.
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| Rain garden - spray painted shape |
Building a rain garden is a bit complicated. They gave us a checklist of things we needed to do to build it...
1. Remove sod
2. Dig the basin - the basin is the bowl in the bottom of the rain garden where the water collects and soaks in. After removing the sod, we had to dig one foot down. (the depth of the basin depends on your soil type and drainage rate)
3. Build the berm - the berm is a the higher area around the rain garden which keeps the water from escaping. Basically, the ground around the rain garden needs to be level, so a berm is built on the lower side of the garden. We used the dirt from the basin to build up the berm.
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| Digging the bason and building the berm |
4. Loosen soil at least 12" below bottom of rain garden. Once the basin was dug, the soil at the bottom needed to be tilled so the water will soak in faster.
5. Spread compost in basin - The amount of compost needed depends on the size of the garden. My rain garden is 150 sq ft, so we had to add one cubic yard of compost into the basin of the rain garden. This helps the plants become established faster, and also helps with drainage.
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| Getting ready to add compost to the basin |
6. Install edging - we chose to use plastic edging, but any type of edging or rock could be used (just like with any other garden)
Once the basin was dug, we could tell that the berm was WAY too high. My husband said it looked like a bunker.
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| Line level for berm height |
He said we just needed to use a line level to re-stake the areas and see how high the berm should be.
Yep, we had a lot of extra dirt to remove.
That was ok, because there are lots of areas in the gardens that could use more dirt. It didn't take long to get the berm down to the right height.
Now all that is left to do is add the plants and mulch (sounds so easy).
I started buying plants already, but planting them was delayed a bit because we had a bunch of rain. Of course, being a rain garden, it filled up with water. Well, at least we know it's working!
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| Rain garden full of water |
I still have a few more plants to buy, but I've already started planning where I'll put everything. This is the fun part! Of course, I'll tell you all about it in a future blog post.
Very cool, that looks like it was a lot of shoveling.
ReplyDeleteSo there's no "intake" per se into the rain garden, but the berm is along the low side and the water runs into the area from higher ground, correct? In your picture there was an awful lot of water, it seems like more than could just collect from rain falling from directly above.
LOL! Yes, but we have very sandy soil so it's easy digging. The depth of the basin depends on the soil type. The basin wouldn't be as deep in harder clay soils.
DeleteActually, there will be an intake area. The area in the corner where the rock wall and fence meet is the point where the water comes in. We'll put in a dry creek bed there to help direct the water into the basin.
The idea is to put a raingarden in a location above where the water flow is the strongest. You don't want it right in the strongest flow of water or it will just get washed away. Our backyard has a slope from the back to the middle of the yard. And then it has steeper grading between the houses to funnel the water down to the street. We put this raingarden at the bottom of the slope, before the steeper grading starts so we can capture some of that water to slow down the flow of runoff.
Take a look at the last picture in my first post here... Raingarden please! You can see the rock wall at the very top of the picture, before the strongest flow of water. Hope that gives you a better idea.
Amy
Gotcha. I was having a bit of a hard time envisioning exactly where it was positioned in the yard. I'm excited to watch your raingarden progress, I think it will look great when it's fully planted and ready for business.
ReplyDeleteYah, it's kinda hard to explain. I never realized how much our yard sloped before we put in that rock wall a few years ago. Plus the neighbors behind us are up an even steeper hill. No wonder we have so much water moving through.
DeleteThanks for following along, I can't wait to have it done! It's dry now, but SOOO hot outside.
Amy