Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show: Raingardens
I’m super excited… I live on a corner and both my streets are getting ripped up and redone! Oh boy…. okay, so that part is a pain in the butt, what I found out was that I qualified to have a raingarden installed! If you’re City is redoing your road, be sure to check with them to see if they have programs like that! I’ll keep you posted on the adventure… it won’t happen till mid summer. In the meantime, I’m going to have to remove my 2 year old butterfly garden… gotta find some place to put those plants.
So… on to raingardens….
A modest 1500 sq. ft. house on a small lot may produce 5,000 gals. of runoff from a 1 inch rain storm! Holy cow, that’s a lot of water down the storm drain.
Raingardens prevent much of that runoff allowing the water to soak into the soil, get cleansed as it passes down and then helps to fill our aquafirs. To learn more about rain gardens I urge you to check out the Blue Thumb Guide to Raingardens. This is a FANTASTIC resource for those of us in northern climates. Here’s a list of plants from the University of Minnesota
Additional information at Capital Region Watershed District
