Rain garden

My latest landscaping experiment is an attempt at creating a rain garden. The back edge of our backyard has a small hill along the fence that blocks water from coming into our yard when it rains. The water runs next to the hill and eventually out into the street. So I thought it would be nice to catch some of that extra water in my yard and add some plants that can handle a few inches of standing water. I didn't bother to figure out exactly if/how the rain garden will actually work. Who needs that stuff? It's more fun to just start digging. Also I don't have any plants for the rain garden yet, those cost money! Again, it's better to just start digging and then everything will sort of work itself out. So I started digging up the grass in the back yard, and making a small ridge around the area where I want the rain garden. I also dug up a small section of the existing hill, so that the water could get into my garden. I didn't expect it to start raining really hard only a few hours after digging my hole. But it was a good way to see how well or badly my idea would work.

So here is what my hole looked like after it rained. My garden is the area close to the fence. The other wet part is where the water came through my dirt wall and into the backyard.



You can't tell from the picture, but the water was flowing pretty fast along the fence, and flowing strongly into and out of my garden. So I guess I still have some work to do. The first priority might be to make my garden bigger, because the rain today was obviously way more than my garden could handle. The important thing is that more rain garden means less grass to cut with my reel mower. And less grass to cut means more time to mess with other parts of my yard :)