Rain Garden in Review, One Year Later

Image of Bee Balm growing in rain garden

Last year, I designed and built a rain garden for Jed Goldstein, a neighbor and friend of mine.  He was having serious water problems in his backyard.  Before he contacted me about the issues, he had talked with a couple of landscapers that suggested installing a French drain and drywell into the yard.  The idea was to collect the rainwater from the backyard and drop it into the driveway.

This is how the backyard looked two days after a rainstorm. The rain garden completely eliminated the problem.

When he asked me about the solution others had suggested, I explained that that type of approach doesn’t give you any added value to your yard or home.  And, overtime most underground drains will get clogged with sediment and stop working as they should.  He asked me what would I do instead, and I started talking to him about rain gardens.  Long story short, he liked the idea and we put the rain gardens into action last year.

Then and Now
We installed the rain garden last year around June (that’s June 2014), and now we have a full year to evaluate it.  I personally think that the rain garden looked great from the moment we installed it.  This year, it looks better than I could have imagined.  The flowers have grown tall and strong.  The soil is healthy and rich. Below is a graphic showing a picture from before we did anything in 2014 (on the left) beside an image from this year (July 2015) with the plants really growing and maturing (on the right).

Same Area from a different angle.

The images below show a part of the yard that was also redone last year.  You can see just how much the space has changed from year to year as well as from June to July.  We were able to take a part of the yard that had no flowers or texture and transform it into a beautiful and alive patch of color and fun!

Jed has really taken the sustainable approach to heart.  At the end of the season last year we mulched the entire garden with an organic, composted mulch to add nutrients to the soil.  Then, at the beginning of this season, we added a nice layer of mushroom compost to the rain garden to give all the plants a boost for the spring and summer.  

Other Sustainable Stuff
We’ve also started detoxing Jed’s yard after years of standard landscape maintenance.  Standard maintenance includes using chemicals to fertilize the grass along with pesticides and herbicides to help the lawn stay green.  We’ve switched all of that up.  We’ve stopped all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.  No toxic stuff is put on the lawn at anytime during the year.  For a farm to be considered “organic”, it has to refrain from chemicals for, at least, three years. Jed is now about half way there.  Non-toxic lawns are safer for kids and pets as well as adults and the greater natural environment.  

White clover in the front yard. No toxic chemicals have been put on the yard, so it's safe for kids to play on it throughout the summer.

Other thing we’ve started doing is cutting the grass 1 every two weeks instead of once a week.  This approach allows for white clover to come up that benefits pollinators from miles around.  It allows the roots to develop too.  Read my blog from early this week to get all the details about caring for your grass sustainably.  

Added Value
One thing I hear all the time from homeowners is that landscape design doesn’t add value to their property.  According to a 2007 survey of 2,000 brokers conducted by HomeGain, an online real estate marketing site, an investment into landscape design can bring a return of as much as four times of the investment.  When your gardening investment also solves problems like flooding issues, the return can even be bigger.