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!