The Rain Garden

This is the site of our new Master Gardener/4-H project. As you can see, it has rained, and that pleased us no end, as it showed how our rain garden is going to work.

We entered into a partnership with the Jackson County 4-H kids to do a Native Plant Garden at first. Then I went and took the Rain Water Harvester Specialist training in September, and the rain garden came to be. After watching the water from the downspouts on the building, I knew we had to do something about the water there, before we did anything in this garden. There is a sidewalk all along 3 sides of this garden, and a concrete curb outside that, so piping the water to the storm drain was out of the question. And besides that, RAINWATER IS VALUABLE!!! Let us endeavor to keep it out of our storm drains, thus depleting the soil of valuable nutrients and taking pollutants to the rivers and streams.

What happens in the rain garden is this: Water will be channeled into the reservoir from the downspouts. We are going to use a dry creek bed effect to get the water from Point A to Point B. Water will collect in this reservoir, and will seep into the ground here. As it does, it will be filtered, leaving the nutrients where we need them. We will not be spraying things in this garden, so hopefully, we won't have pollutants to deal with.

We are going to have a unique bench, constructed of rough cedar, along with a cedar fence (low fence), and cedar post arbors and trellis. IF we have room, we are going to have a little bridge over the 'creek'.

This whole area will be planted in native plants, even the reservoir. It is not a pond. We are going to use buffalo grass along the sidewalk edge to keep our dam from eroding.

I just cannot wait to see this finished. Our target date for finishing is February 17, 2007. We can do it.