And finally on to the BIG rain garden!

The rain garden retaining wall almost finished.

After my marathon re-landscaping project last year, I had planned to relax a bit this summer, do some minor fiddling with the native gardens I planted last year as part of the Slow the Flow grant, and enjoy the compliments of my neighbors. (I would not be surprised if cardinal flower and Joe Pye weed popped up in many of their yards next year, they all love mine and want it now too!) But, yeah, who was I kidding? Relax!? The reality is I've been working on this area of the backyard (left) for the last two months.

The rain garden area in November 2011, before any work was done

After staring at this last, ugly,
barren, plastic landscape cloth-lined section (right) of our backyard all spring I couldn't take it anymore and I picked up a shovel. This section of the backyard was an old cesspool until about 15 years ago when the previous owners had the new septic built in the front yard. The area was filled in with gravel, lined with plastic landscape cloth, and covered in mulch.

Our Conservation Commission approved plan was to dig out the three beech trees that were getting slowly buried by the eroding slope behind the house, terrace the whole area with rocks, add steps down the side, and make it a rain garden. I was going to do it next summer but between the ugliness and the fact that we added two more new gutters to the back of the house, concentrating runoff that could make the erosion worse, it needed to be done. My only problem was I needed rocks, a pallet can go for about $400! And then I met a nice family in town who needed to get rid of A LOT of rocks from a building project and I was all set to go!

Digging the beech trees out was the hardest. They were buried by almost three feet (left) on the high side. Luckily no strangler roots had formed yet, I was just in time. And now they have a nice wall to hold back the slope. 

My kids will no longer have to scramble down the old steep slope (left) to get to the wild part of the backyard. They love these new steps (right) and it's now a nice place to sit and look at the river. 

 

This was most of the area (left) just when I started the work. You can see where the water from the main house gutter will drain into the rain garden through the 6" black hose. A second black hose was added for the new gutter on the family room roof, and both were buried under a new pathway (below).








Right after I buried them, and dug out a temporary small bowl for runoff to collect in, we had a big rain storm. The bowl filled up nicely and not a drop ran down straight to the river. I can't wait to see what happens when it's all landscaped with cardinal flower, ferns and sweet pepper bush, but THAT will definitely have to wait until next spring. With winter coming Mother Nature is preventing me from planting, which is probably a good thing, I really should take a break!

92,160 square inches of roof + 46.83 inches of rain = I'm gonna need a bigger rain garden!

Male fern, Dryopteris filix-mas, in the mini rain garden

This past week I was invited to present my Slow the Flow native garden project and storm run-off solutions to a Boston University class on urban water issues. And, as college students usually do, they asked me a lot of really good questions. The one that stumped me and made me head straight home to find a calculator was, "How many gallons of rainwater runs off your roof and into your mini rain garden?" 

Wow. I had no idea, all I know is in a heavy rain it fills up the rain garden.

There actually is a very simple calculation to figure this out. It's so easy it didn't even make me cringe in my usual manner when I have to tackle a math word problem. You can even try this a home!

My rear roof is about 32' x 20'. The gutter slopes towards the rain garden side of the house, so I can assume almost all the water goes down that one down spout. After the massive downpour on August 10th that caused my mini rain garden to flood in this picture (right) my rain gauge had 2" of rain in it. Now comes the math to figure out how many gallons actually did fill that rain garden:

• Take the dimensions of the roof and convert them to inches. So my 32' x 20' roof is 384" x 240" or 92,160 square inches. 
• Multiply the roof dimensions by the amount of rain fall in inches. For the August 10th storm that's 92,160 x 2" = 184,320.
• Divide by 231 (1 gallon = 231 cubic inches) = 798 gallons fell on my back roof and flowed into the mini rain garden on August 10th (give or take a bit, my rain gauge probably isn't that accurate).

According to NOAA's climate data website Massachusetts received 46.83 inches of rain in the 12 months since we purchased our house. As anyone living in Ipswich knows we often vary greatly from the rest of the state but I will use this number as an estimate. If I redo the math for the last 12 months a whopping 18,683 gallons of water flowed down that one corner downspout and, until I built the rain garden in August, straight into the Ipswich river and out to sea not recharging the watershed at all. It was basically wasted water.

I'll have to add up the whole roof and find out how much rain water could be captured in rain gardens, or even better, a cistern for later use in the garden. With this math in hand you can imagine how productive a single rain barrel can be when placed properly. My two rain barrels only ran dry once this summer. It really doesn't take much rain to fill them.

As cute as the mini rain garden is it clearly needs to be much larger to capture the heavy rain we often get. Since I built the mini rain garden in August we've had two storms heavy enough to fill it, and it's only been two months.

Our long-term plan is to reposition the back gutter to slant towards the still unlandscaped other side of the backyard (left). You can see that the downspout extension hose drains to a very large sloped area. This is just begging to be terraced into a series of rain gardens.

But that is a project for next summer. I think it's time I put away my gardening gloves for the season and enjoy the view of the river.

I'm done! "Nothing to native paradise" accomplished!

Giant swallowtail butterfly feeding on our torch sunflowers

Yesterday afternoon Nancy Pau, the brain-child of the Slow the Flow Grant program from the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, came by my garden to check it out and call it done! And what did I do afterwards? I picked up eight 75% off wild geraniums at Home Depot which I will plant tomorrow.

So now that I am mostly done I thought I would share the best before and after photos of the project. The way the house is now (below) is definitely less "neat and tidy" than it was before but it provides habitat for so many more birds and insects than it did one year ago when nothing would have been flowering in late summer.

"After", September 2012

"Before", Summer 2011 ( http://www.ipswichareahomes.com/property/29-Upper-River-Road-Ipswich-Massachusetts)

     

Side of the house "after", September 2012

side of the house "before", October 2011

The woodland island garden and border above has six species of ferns in it along with culver's root, solomon's seal, Canadian ginger, jack-in-the-pulpit, goats beard, foam flower, bugbane and other native shade plants. One year ago this was bare mulch over plastic sheeting with one giant yew shrub (right).

Last fall our backyard was also mostly mulch over sheets of plastic (left). Over the course of the spring and summer I removed all the plastic, my husband built a fence to keep the kids out of the river, the bare area by our neighbor's wood pile has been landscaped with mostly ferns and I let my kids plant their fairy garden. I also incorporated a rain garden in the lower corner of the fenced area (below) to catch all run off from the roof and side yard.

Backyard "after", September 2012

black-eyed susans, blanket flowers and cardinal flowers

I think the most important part of this landscaping project for the little ecosystem that is our 0.3 acres is the removal of nearly 4,000 square feet of plastic. For me, adding hundreds of native plants to that newly permeable soil just completed the property's transformation from a typical suburban landscape to a native paradise. I am glad to be (mostly) done so I can sit on my garden bench and enjoy it before the winter sets in (oh, and finish painting the house too!) And I am so much looking forward to that first fiddlehead emerging next spring. 

A big thank you to the team at the Parker River Wildlife Refuge for awarding me this grant. Without it I would not have accomplished so much this year and there would most likely be large areas of plastic still on our property. I haven't tackled the other half of the backyard, but that's a project for next summer.





 For an overview of the other PIEs Slow the Flow Grant Program awardees please watch this short video:

The mini rain garden doing its thing

first you dig a trench down the slope

 On the upriver side of our new fenced in child safety area we have a drainage problem. Most of the water from the rear roof drains to this side of the house, forming a lake on the rear patio and leaking back into the basement in a heavy downpour. One of the first things I did when we moved in last fall was to extend the downspout past the patio and away from the house. But then the run off just makes its way straight down the sloped backyard (right) and into the river. We can't have our basement flood, but I knew there must be a way to capture this water and let it soak in to the watershed, preventing it from just flowing straight out to sea. One of the main objectives of the Slow the Flow Grant funding my landscape makeover was to do just this.

the trench with gravel filled channel

 To fix this issue I dug a trench along the new fence and filled it with gravel (left). Then I planted the edges of the trench with lady ferns, male ferns, sensitive ferns, dwarf goats beard and a few non-native hostas divided from existing ones on the property from the old owners. 

ferns and other plants are planted

The gravel-filled trench continues right under the fence and ends in a small circle scooped out like a bowl and filled with compost, loam and more lady ferns. The trench and bowl is edged with plastic landscape edging to hold back run off, preventing it from flowing over the last 30 feet of backyard and straight down the riverbank.

If any of you experienced the heavy downpour that passed through Ipswich this past Friday night you'll know this was the perfect moment to put the mini rain garden to the test.

And it worked.

The water bypassed the brick patio (and our basement), flowed right down the gravel channel and filled up the bottom of the rain garden. From what I could tell little water spilled over and washed into the river. The garden remained flooded about five inches deep until dark but was empty the next morning, with very happy plants that loved their soak.

This was an easy project, and a great solution that keeps our basement from flooding and replenishes the watershed at the same time. It certainly slowed the flow this past Friday evening!

flooded rain garden "bowl"

flooded rain garden trench