Gardens

Rain Gardens

What Is a Rain Garden?

Rain gardens are beautiful natural landscape features that require less maintenance and fewer chemicals than lawns. Rain gardens capture runoff from impervious areas such as roofs and driveways and allow it to seep slowly into the ground. Most importantly, rain gardens help preserve nearby streams and lakes by reducing the amount of runoff and filtering pollutants.

How To Create a Rain Garden

1. Locate a site for a rain garden in a natural depression in the landscape.

2. Determine the size and shape of the rain garden.

• To calculate the size, consider the area draining to a rain garden, including the roof area or impervious area that drains to the downspout and the area of land between the downspout and the rain garden. The larger the roof or impervious (hard) area and the slower that water infiltrates into the soil, the more area of rain garden needed.
• An effective rain garden depends on water infiltrating into the soil of the garden. Soils with a lot of clay will infiltrate water very slowly, so the size of a rain garden in clay soils should be 60 percent of the total drainage area.
• If you determine that your rain garden area needs to be greater than Read more…