From This Dirt Forward

I woke up at 2:00 AM this morning and was horrified to realize that I’d been designing a rain garden in my sleep.  It left me wondering if this dream of mine qualifies as billable work time.  From what I remember, it was a fine conceptual design.  It also made me realize that I really need a vacation.

Since a vacation doesn’t appear to be in my near future, maybe by venting about my recent rain garden experiences, I can clear my mind enough to allow it to return to dreaming about more important things… like flying giraffes. 

My rain garden dream wasn’t out of the blue.  I’m in my third week of a rain garden frenzy, working long hours to design a series of demonstration rain gardens to be installed around the city.  Last night (in real life) I helped to install the first rain garden with an eager army of nearly 100 girlscouts and boyscouts.

The rain garden plants laid out (note: perfectly) before the volunteer planters arrived

Rain gardens are specialized gardens that collect runoff from roofs and other impervious surfaces during storm events, allowing the water to slowly soak back into the ground while native plants filter out pollutants.  Rain gardens help to prevent polluted runoff from going into storm sewers and draining out into nearby streams and waterways.

But I’m not here to lecture; I’m only here to vent personal commentary.  If you’re interested in more rain garden information and design recommendations, I’ve listed a few good web resources at the bottom of this post. 

Installing this first rain garden with pint-sized volunteers was an interesting experience because half of me was delighted that we had so many enthusiastic little hands in the dirt and the other half of me, the perfectionist half, was screaming inside as I witnessed my precise design and perfect layout being muddled beyond recognition.  Despite detailed instructions and a handful of planting coaches, within minutes the garden turned into something more like a battlefield; the plants standing no chance against the army of scouts.  Everywhere I looked there were little feet crushing pots, little bums sitting on plants, plants too deep in their holes, too shallow, and even up-side-down.  

The first stampede of volunteers hits the rain garden

Because I’ve never known a life without gardening, I sometimes forget that there are fifth graders who have never touched a trowel in their lives. Something that seemed so obvious, like to take the plant out the pot before putting it in the ground, I quickly realized wasn’t that obvious to some of my volunteers. 

I felt my heart skip a beat as one kid flipped a gallon-sized pot over and used it as a stool as he dug a hole for the now-crushed plant still inside it. 

This particular rain garden was intended to be a more formal example of a rain garden (oops!), compared to what is typically a wild-looking congregation of native plants.  When designing it, I chose some of the better-behaved native plants to flow in curvilinear swaths through the center of the garden, a border of Prairie Dropseed (Sporobolis heterolepsis) to give the garden a soft, but defined edge.  To demonstrate how a native-plant-leery homeowner can incorporate a few familiar ornamental plants into their rain garden, I added a couple of masses of Stella D’Oro daylilies in the corners, which helped to link the rain garden with the more traditional surrounding landscape.  These bright yellow, long blooming lilies will also contrast nicely with the masses of native Pale Purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida) behind them.

After the kids left, my co-worker and I quickly replanted the worst-off plants and mourned the loss of the perfect curves and plant spacing we worked so hard to lay out.  But when all said and done, it still didn’t look too bad and if just one kid came away from the experience with a sparked interest in gardening, then it was all worth it.

This really is a wonderful sight.

The end product. This rain garden collects runoff from a portion of the building's roof surface, sidewalk, and Mastodon(!!).

Here are a few of the better (in my opinion) web resources for designing and installing your own rain garden:

General rain garden info:
http://dnr.wi.gov/runoff/rg/

In-depth design tools: 
http://www.lowimpactdevelopment.org/raingarden_design/index.htm

Rain garden plant selection (for the Upper Midwest):
http://www.pca.state.mn.us/publications/manuals/stormwaterplants.html

I’m sure my husband has appreciated the week off from being the main character of my blog.  But don’t worry; he is currently fleshing out an idea for what I’m calling a poor man’s topsy turvy.  Something about a 5-gallon bucket and growing things upside-down.  I can already tell its going to have great blog potential.