I got an email from one of the Water Resources people who helps with the Master Rain Gardener program for the county saying that there were free rocks available to us. Yay!
I was planning to sift more rocks out of my yard in the spring to finish up the southeastern trench connector, and not looking forward to it. This was an offer I could not pass up. I picked up a couple of hundred pounds yesterday and put them in place as soon as I got home.
It’s a trench rather than a buried pipe connector because of all the roots. I am delighted to have the plastic finally out of sight.
There is one other spot in the yard with downspout woes—on the north side of the house. Somehow, reconfiguring that downspout never occurred to us when we added on the kitchen some decades ago [to the right in the photograph]. The downspout stuck out so far that I took the final section off. That section is on the ground next to the house in the back, and serves as a reliable chipmunk condo.
The remaining downspout is only trouble when it pours. I put one of those plastic splash guards under it years ago, which helps, but now I’ve added rocks where the soil would be splattered and washed away. Handily enough, this leads right into the pawpaw bed. The pawpaws get standing water under them less than once a year from this downspout, and rocks should mitigate the washouts. I hope.