Why did we do this?

The plant in the photo is an Obedient Plant that I rescued from a rain garden that was being dug up, due to construction, at the church where it was located.   I'm hoping it will survive until September when we will be planting our baby plants and rescuees. I've been working alot of overtime lately and neglecting to write about the Rain Garden.  We are in somewhat of a holding pattern right now, until September, in terms of activity.  I was asked to post about my motivation for installing the Rain Garden.   The obvious answer is that our back yard gets very sodden with heavy rain and  when the soil gets saturated the water seeps in through our foundation into our basement. 
I have always been interested in eco-friendly approaches to doing things.   I give my mother credit for this as she is a birder, an amateur botanist, and an all-round lover of nature.  She is also feisty and speaks her mind about issues that involve destruction or degradation of natural areas.  I absorbed all of this as I was growing up.  At some point, several years ago, I became aware of a group called "Wild Ones", which is an organization that encourages landscaping with native plants.  Through Wild Ones, I became aware of the work our landscape architect, Marcus, had done on a house in Elmhurst and spent alot of time looking over the web site that he put together about it,  fascinated by the possibilities for managing water in an environmentally friendly way. 
Long story short - We got in touch with Marcus and asked if he could work with us, given that we have a fairly limited budget, and he was willing to do so.   He very carefully looked over the situation with our house and yard, had me do water-absorption research in the front and back yards, then recommended that the first step would be to establish a rain garden that would allow us to route the water coming off the roof from the back to the front yard.

Misting System for the Baby Plants

Dave and I installed a misting system for my baby rain garden plants that seems like it will do the trick and give me a break from spending 60-90 minutes out in the back yard watering every night. I was actually out there watering at 11:00 Sunday night due to the fact that my schedule was thrown outta whack by our meeting my daughter's boyfriend's Mother, for the first time,  for dinner Sunday night, after which I forgot to do the watering. Later, lying in bed, drifting away to dreamland, it occurred to me that I hadn't watered ... visions of dead baby aesclepias, eupatorium, and panicum danced through my brain until I dragged myself out of bed, threw on my seersucker robe, and headed outside with a flashlight. Going out there late at night is always a bit of a nerve-wracking experience for me, as we not only have some raccoons living nearby, but lately Dave and many of our neighbors have spotted a family of skunks ...

Please let it rain tonight!

I hear thunder and I see lightning and I am hoping that we will get some rain tonight! I have been watering my approx. 2000 baby plants every night trying to keep them alive. So far, except for earlier this year, during our hot spring, when I lost about 15% of my plants (due to the fact that I was not as diligent as I should have been and was using a sprinkler that did not distribute the water evenly enough), I am managing to keep them all going. But between the demands of my job right now and hand-watering/misting the plants, I am putting in some very long days. Yawn...  Time to go to bed.

What would you like to know more about?

There are so many things about this project that I would love to share with you!   What would you like to know more about?   The physical layout of the garden?   More information on how the water will be routed from the backyard?  A list of the plants that we will be planting?   Write your questions as comments on this post and I will answer them (as long as they are reasonable and relevant).  It's that simple.    

This is baptisia alba or white wild indigo, one of the plants that we will be planting this fall.

https://www.prairiemoon.com/seeds/wildflowers-forbs/baptisia-leucantha-alba-white-wild-indigo/

For those of you who like Facebook...

We now have a Facebook page!  We are just getting started with it, but we will try to keep it in synch with the blog.  So for those of you who are "on Facebook", here ya go:
http://www.facebook.com/RainGardenOnWashingtonBlvd

Baby plants

Baby plants Part 2

This is a tray of baby plants that will take up permanent residence in our rain garden this fall. It is one tray of 50 trays that contain a variety of plants that we will include in our garden. So... are you wondering what it is? Me too! I carefully numbered all of the trays with permanent markers when I planted the seeds, but many of the markings have washed away, so I have a bit of work to do to figure out what's what!

I had meant to post entries more frequently to this blog but "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans" (!) 

We met with Marcus, our landscape architect, last night.  He looked over the cover crop and the baby plants that we have growing in the back yard.   Some of the baby plants did not fare so well in the hot dry weather, and we talked about moving them to a shadier part of the back yard so they would have a chance to recover.  I didn't have a chance to move them yet, but it was cloudy, cool, and rainy all day today, which had to be helpful.

In our discussion with Marcus about the cover crop, I found out that I was mistaken when I wrote the plan was to overturn the cover crop that is growing right now and plant another this summer.   Marcus reminded me that we had spoken of having two cover crops last year when we thought we would be getting an earlier start excavating the rain garden.  But, due to several delays, the biggest one being a NICOR nightmare (the story of which I will relay in a separate entry), we got a much later start than we had planned and decided to go with one cover crop before doing the permanent planting in September of this year. 

In other news, on the advice of the Village of Lombard, we are going to create a yard sign, large enough to read by folks driving by in their cars, to let people know that the cover crop is a temporary situation, to be replaced by a Rain Garden.  So, we are trying to figure out how to make this sign.   I've been looking on the internet for graphic images of rain gardens and came across this interesting piece on WordPress. 

How to Build a Rain Garden

If you have any ideas to share on making the sign, please post your suggestions as comments.   And, if you have other feedback, I welcome that too!

You've Got Mail!

We received a letter from the Village of Lombard yesterday indicating that our grass was too tall and needed to be cut back to 8".   Dave called the Village today to remind them that we went through the process last October of getting the permit, which involved Marcus providing detailed plans and a list of plants that would eventually take up permanent residence.   We are waiting to hear back from the man who will make the call on this one. 

 

In the meantime, I've been wondering about the best way to cut it back.   It's pretty tall.   How would you go from 2 feet of Rye and Oats to 8 inches?   I'm thinking about renting some goats.  :-)

 

I hope it doesn't come down to that though, because Marcus said it wouldn't be nearly as pretty if we had to cut it - it's just going to look stubbly and brown.   I wish I knew who called in the complaint so that I could explain that to them because I think they may like what it looks like less after it's cut than before.  Que sera sera (ie. whatever will be, will be -think Doris Day.)

What is a Rain Garden?

We found out about rain gardens through a web site, developed by our Landscape Architect, Marcus de la fleur, that does a beautiful job of explaining their usefulness and construction.  That web site can be found here: http://www.delafleur.com/168_Elm/06_Rain_Gdn_01.html.

It is important to note that all rain gardens do not look the same and we intend for our front-yard rain garden to have the plants grouped in such a way as to create a sense of order that will fit in with the tidy well-maintained look of our neigborhood.

Here is a nice illustration I found on the web that shows a cross-section view of a typical rain garden.

(from http://www.ofallon.org/public_documents/ofallonil_parksrec/Garden%20Club%20Rain%20Garden)