The Rain Garden Hooked Up and In Action!

So what has been happening in this garden? August is a quiet month. The plants just wait for rain.

I have been stumped over connecting up the downspouts to the rain garden because of tree roots by the southern downspout, and some very ambitious nannyberries that I realized were in front of the northern downspout.

I abandoned the idea of the northern connection and decided that the southern connection would have to be a nice gravel- and rock-lined trench. The slope by the northern downspout is quite good and the water seems to land in the rain garden rather than the driveway. The southern end of the rain garden is higher and shallower than the northern end, so I figured it would all work out.

I had a cancelation August 25, so I finally connected my southern downspout to the rain garden.

First, I dug a shallow trench and tried to make it reasonably smooth by sluicing water down the trench. There were honey locust roots, some of which I cut. The two fat ones by the black-eyed susans got gravel underneath.

It looks like water has sluiced down the trench, because it has—I lowered the high spots with a gushing garden hose. Photographed August 25, 2017.

I lined the trench with a quadruple layer of black plastic garden mulch, and filled it with the rocks and gravel I had sifted out of the soil. I will need more gravel, and I may just be sifting various spots around the yard to finish.

I haven’t measured the incline, but the water rolls down nicely. There is one spot that needs adjusting, but it’s not bad.

The gravel and rocks from the rain garden’s original soil fill the trench. Photographed August 25, 2017.

I ran more water down the trench to be sure that it wouldn’t all shift under flowing water.

After running more water down the trench, everything more or less reached an equilibrium level—and the two spots where you see plastic are the two spots where the roots are. Photographed August 25, 2017.

The shifting was minor, but you can see those roots—they are under the bumped-up plastic.

The nice thing about this little project was that my rain garden got a good soaking. Today we got another soaking courtesy of the weather. We had torrential rain for a few minutes around 6 p.m.; when it let up a little, I went out to take some pictures.

As you can see, it did all work out. The torrent ran down to the northern end.

We were promised rain, and we got it! I took this picture at 6:11 p.m. at the northern end of the garden, September 4, 2017.

This soil is very porous. It really surprises me, but it has had nothing but a lawn on it for decades—so it probably hasn’t got a lot of organic matter.

This is what the spot looked like at 6:21 p.m.! Photographed September 4, 2017.

I expect there will be a final flush of growth for the year. The redbud shot up over a foot after the last real rain mid-month.