The new issue of OG has an article about rain gardens and the website has a link to some brochures. I am curious about whether any of you have created one and how you like it.

When we aren't having a drought, we have a lot of runoff and minor flooding. I thought it might be a means of soaking up some of the water during storms, tropical and otherwise.

Another question I haven't seen addressed is whether this will do much good for someone who doesn't have gutters on their house. (I don't.) All the literature seems to start with gutters.

Any comments?

I was just listening to WHO 1040 a.m. from Des Moines the other day. They are promoting rain gardens and the goal is to have 1040 of them in the Des Moines area. Cool.

This is a real neat idea and works wonderfully for those who have a "boggy" area. Here are some sites for more info:
http://www.mninter.net/~stack/rain/

http://www.raingardens.org/Index.php

quote:

Another question I haven't seen addressed is whether this will do much good for someone who doesn't have gutters on their house. (I don't.) All the literature seems to start with gutters.

Any comments?

While I don't have a rain garden, or gutters either for that matter, we will be going to a resort next week that had one last year and I don't remember it being fed from gutters, in fact it was about 20 feet from the nearest building. I will double check it, if it is still there, when I'm there next week and let you know.

the point of the rain garden is to catch all of your overland water flow.

If you have gutters, that makes it easy to direct all of the runoff to one spot.

Thank you all for the information. T-Gardener, Anything you can note during your trip would be appreciated. I don't have but about 1 foot of difference in elevation on my property, but I am about 2' lower than my neighbors, so I get all the runoff from them during a heavy rain. I have had as much as 2' of water covering my entire yard at one time. Thankfully that isn't typical, but I often have the front part of the yard with standing water when the drainage ditch backs up during a heavy rain. I will read these brochures and see if I can figure out a solution for my situation.

OOOH!

I read an article about a similar problem, in one of those fancy gardening magazines. The lot was the lowest in the subdivision and everyone elses water ran to their backyard.

The people hired expensive landscapers and came up with the following:

They graded the yard so that there was a low spot. At the low spot they dug a giant hole, big enough to hold the maximum amount of water they thought they would get. They filled the hole with rocks, I think they had a screen at the top of the hole too, to make sure no critters fell in. Then, at surface level they made it a dry rock bed (no plants), and stuck a gazebo on top of the entire thing. The edges were landscaped with flowers and plants. So it was supposed to be a pretend pond.

The giant underground hole full of rocks was supposed to hold all of the extra water as it slowly percolated into the ground.

Alaskan- Thank you for this information. I don't know that I can afford something this elaborate, but it does present some ideas. Also, it feels good to know I'm not the ONLY one! If I could even displace a foot of it, it would hopefully eliminate the flooding of the crawl space under my house and the ductwork for my heat pump. Barb

Hi Barbs Garden--Here is what I observed (sorry I didn't get any pictures). They had a depression dug in the soil about 12 inches deep and 12 feet around, in it they had planted many different flowers--monarda, purple coneflower, etc., about 5 feet away they had erected a little shed which had a small wooden gutter on it, from the gutter they had a pipe about 1 1/2 in. in diameter, which was connected to a hose, which was buried in the ground and emptied into the depression. The garden was really very attractive, and though it's possible it was just because I wasn't around all day, there did not seem to be a great deal of maintenance involved, beyond normal, flower bed maintenance. Hope this helps.

T-Gardener- This is great; thank you so much for checking it out and describing for me. I really appreciate it so much!