Rain Gardens 101: Lecture and Q&A by Dr. Michael Dietz transcript

[Music] Welcome everyone to our environmental learning series tonight. Uh my name is Siobhan. Hello. Uh, and if you have not joined us for one of these lectures before, um, or if you're not familiar with Earth Place or even if you're not local to Connecticut or Westport, um, I'll just tell you a little bit about us. Earthplace is a nature center here in Westport, Connecticut. And if you are somewhat close by, ever in Westport or near us, um, I recommend coming just checking out the trails.

We've got a lovely wildlife sanctuary uh as well as a building with lots of uh non or nonreable native animals as well as just some fun ones to come and meet and some exhibits inside as well. We also have lots of programs uh educational and fun. Uh and some big ones we have coming up is one in the summer in June called Mothball. It'll be our third annual Mothball. Uh big celebration of moths and nocturnal wildlife and we'll be doing light sheeting.

Uh and a little sooner than that, well also in June, uh we have a biob blitz going on. So if you are interested in joining a biob blitz, participating one either for the first time just to check it out or potentially as uh an expert in coming to help us survey our wildlife sanctuary. Um please consider coming to join us. Uh and if you are not so local, I know we might have some people joining us from outside of Connecticut tonight.

Uh we do have this monthly environmental learning stage series where we have a different expert uh join us tell us about their special topic, their subject. Our next one is going to be about lights out in Connecticut um and how to help migrating birds and other wildlife. And that will be April, let's see, just reminding myself of the date. Our lights out talk will be April 15th also at 7 p.m. So, uh, tonight we are going to learn all about rain gardens, uh, how to install them and why.

And to do that, we have our water usage expert, uh, Dr. Michael Deetsz, professor at Yukon. And I'm going to let him tell you a little bit more about himself and tell us all about rain gardens. So, thank you, Mike, for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you, Siobhan. And um I I don't think we talked about it beforehand, but if you guys if you want to record this, that's fine with me. I don't know if you usually do that with these presentations, but that's fine to record and post.

So, uh thank you everybody for coming tonight. It's my pleasure to be here with you to to talk about rain gardens. And um as Siobhan mentioned, I'm a professor at Yukon and also am an extension educator. So if you're not familiar with what extension does, we basically take some of the science and the knowledge that's generated on campus and translate it out to the real world in ways that is relevant to real people. So uh that's why I like being extension because it has a very practical focus to it and we're not just doing research and learning about things just for the sake of doing it.

We are actually trying to get things in the ground and learn how to do stuff better and and teach other people about them. So that's why the where I am, what I do, and why I like it. And um I guess I'll just also ask where if you have questions, you can drop them in the chat while while I'm talking and we'll go through those at the end. We'll have plenty of time here to answer questions if you have them. And just a little bit of an overview where we're going tonight.

So I'm just going to have a few slides where I talk about a little bit of background information here. So, so just if you're not familiar with these issues and why we even need rain gardens. I'm just going to talk very briefly about that. So, if you know about this stuff, please don't be offended. I just need to make sure that everybody understands where we are and why we're even talking about this stuff. And then I'll go through some of the basics about rain gardens, how to install them, how to size them properly, the plants to choose, and how to maintain them.

So, that's where we're headed. So, let's go ahead and get started. So again, this is just the background information here. When if you talk to some of the older generations, if you talk to my parents' generation, definitely my grandparents generation, and we we talked about water pollution or water water problems, these are the type of things, the images that would probably come into people's mind and things that people would point to to say, "Yeah, that that's water pollution." So the the image on the top there is a rather famous one from the Kyhoga River in the in the 1960s.

That river caught on fire multiple times through the 1950s and 1960s. Other rivers have been the basically the waste dumping grounds as our cities have developed around the world and uh basically accepted everything from chemicals to sewage untreated. And the results were typically fish would not survive, other aquatic life would not survive in there. And um ultimately we we started to endanger our own health. So these types of poll pollutants and this source these sources of pollution are typically called point source pollution.

There's an identifiable place where we can say there's a factory here. This this city is dumping raw sewage out of this pipe. Like we it's a particular point that you can identify and control that that discharge. In 1972, something called PL92500 happens. So there were earlier iterations of what we call the Clean Water Act, but the 1972 version of this was really the landmark one that really galvanized water quality and air protection in this country as well.

There was also a clean air act that happened at the same time. This is when the environmental protection agency was established at this same time. So, uh, 1972 is also a very good year for other reasons. It happens to be the year I was born. So, you can see in the picture, or maybe you can see in the video here, I had a lot more hair in the picture there when I was a little baby than I do now, unfortunately. So, u, while I would love to take credit for all the good things and the changes that have taken place in our waters since that time, I can't obviously, but major improvements have taken place.

It's pretty foreign. Nobody, especially the younger generation here, can't even imagine seeing rivers that were different colors or rivers that are catching fire. It's a foreign thought to us these days because in general, our waters across this country are much better quality than they were in the late 1960s and early '7s when this legislation started. But what we're left with are some persistent challenges. Something that we call non-point source pollution.

So this is pollution from two different sources. There's two different types of non-point pollution. One is from agricultural areas. So, we're not going to really focus on that tonight, but that is really either fertilizers or manure waste that runs off of farm fields and gets into our local waters. So, that is a major problem in the center part of our country and in other parts as well. But, we won't focus on that tonight.

We're mostly talking about urban areas. So non-point source pollution from urban areas is the runoff that happens when water falls on all these impervious surfaces, which we'll talk about here tonight, and runs off into our local waters and ultimately ends up damaging them because of the quantity and quality of that water that's in there. And it's really difficult to control this type of pollution especially in our urban areas because it's not easy to find where all these pipes go and and there's networks everywhere and it's not just one place you can say okay you got to fix the problem here.

It's a very complex problem. So the main driver here and again please forgive me if I'm if you know all this stuff. It's easy to forget it. I'm a water guy and I deal with this stuff every day and sometime, you know, if I walk outside and it's raining like it's going to be tomorrow morning, I'm not thinking about the water cycle every time I walk out the door and it's raining. But this hydraologic cycle is happening around this planet all the time as every every minute that we speak here.

So, there's a lot going on here. I'm not going to focus too much in detail on this. The bottom line is this place where the precipitation falls on the landscape and water either sinks into the soil or runs off the surface and is directed off the surface into our local waters is a really critical piece of the water cycle that we've had a major impact on. So as we've developed on the landscape and put our buildings, our parking lots and other things that are impervious to water on the landscape, we have dramatically altered the hydraologic cycle.

So the we've changed the quantity we've increased the quantity of water that runs off into our local waters and we've also degraded the quality of that water by the things that that water picks up as it washes over these surfaces. So these are all known impacts that have been researched for decades here and around the world really. So again, these are the types of surfaces we're talking about that that drive these issues. our parking lots, our roads, our driveways, our rooftops, things that water cannot pass through when the when the rain falls on it.

So, my I come from a blueco collar background. My uncle has a has a construction company, actually just retired from it. Everybody in my family worked in the trades. So, as you might imagine, when when I come to our holiday gatherings, we have some rather spirited discussions about water and what the big deal is and why people why a construction guy should care about water. He always says to me, "What's the big deal?

It's just rain washing off the pavement. How can it be causing that much of a problem?" So, I try to put this into a point where it's it's easy to think about and easy to put it to visualize it. So, this is something that I I'll often do. So here is an example from the town of Westport town hall. So your building right there, if we just take the area that's in yellow here. So the building in the parking lot and look at that for a second.

That's about 96,000 square ft of impervious cover of asphalt and building. Just about 2 acres, just a little over 2 acres of imperous cover. If we get one inch of rain, just one inch of precipitation, 59,000 gallons of water run off of that site. 59,000 gallons. Think about that for a second. That's an enormous quantity of water. Where does it go? It has to go into the catch basins that you see around the parking lots and the roads.

Most of the rooftops in our developed areas are tied into the same pipes that go underground and go directly out into either an estuary or local stream. If we're in some of our bigger cities, that water will go into what we call a combined sewer system like New Haven, for example, they have that. Bridgeport has that. That is even more problematic because that storm water mixes with sewage and if we get too much rain that can cause overflows of that into our local waters and then you get things like beaches shut down because there's too much bacteria in the water.

But our smaller towns like Westport and others have a separate system. So that storm water alone just going into those local waters is very problematic. If we now think about an average year, so in this state we get about 48 inches of precipitation on average. That is 2.8 million gallons of water that will run off of that site in an average year. Or if you put it in another unit, it's about four Olympic size swimming pools full of water.

So this is just one small building and parking lot now. So think now about going to the larger cities, go to Manhattan and think about what one inch of rain, the trillions of gallons of water that are now going to run off of that city and how that gets handled and the consequences that that has on all the receiving waters. It's a staggering number. So one little piece of land is, you know, my house is not going to cause the Long Island Sound to fail.

But when you put all this stuff together, it has a dramatic impact. So because of this, storm water is just behind runoff from from agricultural areas and it is one of the top sources of water pollution according to EPA in our country at this point in time. So hopefully I haven't depressed you too much with the background information here, but there there is some hope. So even though we do have these persistent problems from our urban areas, rain gardens are one solution that helped to address this issue.

So this concept originated in Maryland in the 1990s, part of what we call or what they called at the time low impact development. So just like we have our Long Island Sound in Maryland's the Chesapeake Bay was very important to them and they were finding that it was being degraded because of runoff from urban and agricultural areas. So they wanted to create a a different way to develop that would still allow development to to occur.

They knew they couldn't shut down development. Nobody wanted to do that, but they wanted to try to do it in a way that made that development function as if it were an undeveloped site, a forested site. So that's really where this concept originated. So very simply, a rain garden is just a depression in the landscape that's designed to collect and infiltrate storm water. be besides performing this function though they do have other benefits.

They have some ecosystem benefits which we'll talk about and they also have aesthetic benefits. So there are other ways to manage storm water below the surface just to infiltrate it into the ground that you can you don't really see but we like to use rain gardens because they have these other functions as well. So I'll just go through a few examples for you here so you can see what these look like. This is from a colleague's house.

This was a small rain garden that he put in at the edge of his driveway and his road. And this very simple rain garden. Probably put it in in an afternoon. Maybe cost about $100, $150 in plants at the time. So very straightforward and pretty small. This is the former Secretary of State's house in Hartford. She lives right near Elizabeth Park and has a very small lot here, one of those postage stamp lots in the city. but she learned about rain gardens at a garden show and wanted to be an example in her community and put in a rain garden to treat runoff from her rooftop in at her home.

So, she paid a landscaper to do this and this nice stone work was put in. So, this cost a little bit more money, but uh you can see it has a very nice aesthetic in the front yard there as well. This is a garden that we put in with some master gardeners down at the Norwich extension office. So handles some runoff from this from the extension building that's there and treats it in this tiered rain garden. We had to do that that build that type of build because of the slope that was there.

This is a small garden that I worked on with some students at Yukon a few years back. So taking runoff from the roof of a dorm that was right here that previously went into a pipe that was disconnected and directed out to this rain garden. There it is. You can see that disconnection on the building. Now that pipe drains to the rain garden. You can see how nice that that looks. We got a very nice aesthetic there managing that storm water.

This is one of the most recent ones. We did this with a group of students. This was actually they're doing. They came to me and I I basically just facilitated this for them, but they they actually got a small grant from the university and I helped them get this one in the ground and made it happen. So, this is some runoff from a building right next to our the Yukon Dairy Bar. And so, here was the installation day. They had they rallied a lot of students to help here putting all these plants in.

There's the finished garden. Some of the nice flowers. So, here's some purple cone flower when it was blooming later in the summer. You can see the monarch butterfly in there. So, we got nice ecosystem benefits here. And a little bit later in the summer, there's some of the larae from the from the uh the the butterflies there. So this really doing the doing the job here and providing the habitat for these pollinators to to uh to reproduce.

Really exciting to see that. And this is later in the fall. So the students picked some flowers that would flower at different points during the year. So we have some beautiful aers that were flouring right into the month of November here. So very successful projects and have a a nice scale that's manageable to uh to work on as with a group of students. We also have some larger ones at Yukon. So these are this term bio retention is often used when something is a little bit larger like this and involves some engineering ahead of the the the installation for the design work.

So when you've got when you're treating runoff in these larger buildings, you need some sort of overflow structures. You need drainage underneath these things and often, you know, containment for the sides. So there is some more engineering that goes into these, but the concept is the same. taking runoff from those buildings, allowing them to allowing it to sink into the ground, creating habitat at the same time. All right, we all ready?

Here we go. This is a crash course for you. We're going to go through this here in the next half an hour. We're going to make you rain garden experts. Okay, here we go. All right. So, some very important considerations if you are thinking about putting a rain garden in at your location. thinking about where you're placing that garden in relation to things like a building and if it's got a basement below it. So, you want to keep it at least 10 to 15 ft away from a building because you don't want to be sinking a lot of water down right next to that foundation because that water can go into the basement and cause water problems.

Nobody needs that. The other thing to pay attention to are wells. So if if there's a wellhead or a septic system that you are actually legally required to stay at least 25 ft away from those according to the Department of Public Health regulations that exists because you don't want to be sinking that water down right near where your well is or on a septic. So when you are thinking about where you might be putting in your rain garden, you have to be aware that there will be water ponded in there sometimes.

It's okay. We expect to see that now. It's a little bit foreign to us because most times we don't see water ponding. Now, our typical engineering design has water go into those catchbas and into those pipes and get away from sight as quickly as possible. So, this is what nature does. Sometimes water fills up in these depressions in the landscape. What we don't want is to have it standing here for a long period of time.

We want it to infiltrate so that it it leaves room for that water coming in the next storm. And we also don't want it standing for a long period of time when we could be breeding mosquitoes and other things like that. It's not designed to be a long-term pond. That's an important note. So, some other things to think about on that topic of of long-term ponding. You want to make sure you're not placing a rain garden in area that has a high water table already.

So, if you know you've got a perpetually wet area, it's not a great place to put a rain garden because that water can sink in and it and it will actually cause it to fail. The other thing to pay attention to are really clayy soils. You can still make it work sometimes if there's some clay in the soil, but the more important piece is you want to make sure that you're not having you're not working on soils that are extremely compacted.

So that been soil that has been run over with machinery or even heavy foot traffic can cause that soil to get compacted and make a rain garden not function very well. So we have some resources here that might be of use. So on our Nemo website, so nemo.youukon.edu/rainguardens, that's the main site that will bring you there. There is a tab on there that has a soils map. If you go to the design section that will show you the drainage class in your location.

So we'll zoom in. It will you'll see where you are on the map and you can see in rough terms what the drainage class is. Whether you have excessively drained soils or well- drained soils, these are the type of soils that you want, even moderately well- drained is okay. Once you start getting into somewhat poorly drained or poorly drained soils, then you you're going to be suspicious that it might not be able to infiltrate that water that that you need to.

So, like the green in this area, for example, if you saw that that was those were the type of soils that were on your entire property, you really want to rethink that and maybe look at a different location for the installation. But these are very this is a coarse estimate. It's really better to once you get a you can let's let's say you find that your soils are moderately well drained or well drained. So that sounds good.

You still might want to do a quick infiltration test just to make sure the soils in your exact location are suitable to infiltrate water. So a simple way to do that dig a hole 12 in deep fill it up with water and if you've still got water in it after 24 hours it's not suitable for a rain garden. So, it's not a perfect test, but it's a it's a reasonable quick estimate to give you a good idea whether this you've got standing water in there.

I guess if you dig the hole 12 in deep and you've got standing water already, you know, it's not a good spot to put the rain garden right off the bat. You don't even have to fill it up. But, usually you you won't in most cases you won't find standing water right away. But, um fill it up, let it come back a day, and see how it looks. So, sizing that garden is also really important because if you make it too small, you're going to have too much water coming in there off of your roof or parking lot or whatever it might be, overburdening it and causing it to overflow more frequently.

So, the way we need to size these is based on the area of rooftop or other impervious surface that drains to it. So, in this example here, this is our Hatam extension office or Middle Sex extension office in Hatam. So, we need to figure out how much roof area drains to the place where you want to put the garden. In this case, I knew that this section of roof drained to a gutter down spout here. So, if we look at this from above, here's that section of roof.

We can measure this. I'm going to show you a couple ways to do it. This can be done very simply from the ground with a tape measure, but I'll give you some fancier ways here shortly. But the bottom line is that's about 580 square ft. This other little section of roof also contributed to it. And this section of driveway also contributed to the area where we wanted to install the rain garden, which was right above that in that little turnaround, the island in there.

So, if we add up all of those areas, it totaled 960 ft of impervious cover. Rain gardens typically were sized to contain 1 in of rainfall in a depression 6 in deep. Now, that's just the basic sizing, the 6-in depth sizing, that can be adjusted. But what has changed, the guidance now has changed to size them according to a 1.3 in precipitation event. And um if anybody has been has paid attention to this or if you've lived in Connecticut for a long time, you know generally that we're getting more intense storms than we used to.

And you don't need any any data to really tell you that. You can probably just have the sense if you've lived here for a while. But if you look at the data, which is this is exactly what what Noah did. So they evaluated our existing precipitation data looking back all the way to the beginning of when we were collecting records up until the like the 2010 time frame. They could see that our precipitation was had increased dramatically and what had changed were our more extreme events.

So they decided to or Connecticut Department of Energy and Environment sorry Environmental Protection decided to change their sizing guidance up to 1.3 in to reflect that change in the precipitation which was a really good thing. So that that again just for reference that's not any prediction about our changing climate that isn't a looking back at our existing data that we already have just on precipitation. So this is known changes that have happened in our pre precipitation here in the state.

So then you to uh if we were using that 6 in depth as a as a guide, you can whatever number you're going to use for your depth, you can just divide that 960 by that number. So this example here, we're saying it's going to be 6 in deep. 960 / 6 would be 160 ft. If we're using that updated guidance, which is 1.3, you would multiply it by 1.3 and it gives you 28 square feet. So that's the simple estimate. If you wanted to make it a little deeper, say you had you didn't have a lot of surface area and you didn't have any concerns about anybody tripping and falling into a little bit deeper garden, you would just divide 960 by 12 instead, multiply by 1.3, and you would get half that size.

So 104 ft. But if if even that math there gives you a little bit of math phobia and is triggering anyone here with some math anxiety, uh I'm here to save the day. We have an app that will help you do this without having to do any of the math yourself. Okay, I can hear the size of relief already even though everybody's muted. So, we built this app a number of years ago. We built it just for Connecticut first and based it on the a workshop series that we used to do and and a fact sheet that we had.

So basically translated all the information that I'm talking about tonight here with you and how to size the gardens. There's some little videos in here about like the placement and other things that we've talked about so far, but how to do the sizing. So there are two ways you can do this now in the app. So the first one is you can utilize your phone to use the imagery that we have now at at hand that's super easy to to access.

So the Google Earth imagery, you can zoom right into your site and as you can see in the image there, you can tap out the outline of the roof area that you want to treat and hit calculate area. The app will then tell you how big that area is and how big the rain garden should be. I just I I will note that we are actually in the process of changing this right now. our app developers is updating this to reflect that 1.3 guidance.

So, as of last week, I think it was still the 1 in guidance in there. So, just be aware of that. The other option that's in there is a sizing calculator. So, if you know the width and length of your rooftop or your parking lot, you can just enter that in here or enter the square foot square footage of your drainage area. And you can select your state. We we have expanded this to 23 other states now. So obviously you would select Connecticut if you're here, but you can select other states if that's appropriate for you.

And if you go down below, you can change those sliders to reflect the rainfall depth. So there you could change that to reflect the 1.3 in guidance. You can change the storage depth and that thing will automatically change on the fly and tell you how big the rain garden should be. The other things that are in here also the soils data that I mentioned from the website. So that's all in the map so you can see right where you are and what that drainage class is. and our plant database is in there.

So, I haven't talked about the plant yet. We'll get to that shortly, but that plant database is also in the app and easily accessible in there. So, that's the URL for the app itself. The Rain Garden website is different. It's it's all the same information in both places. This URL is just optimized for viewing on the cell phone. Okay. On to installation. So, if you're you've got all this stuff taken care of, you know that you're ready to go, everything is looks good, your site is is suitable, and you've taken all these things into consideration, you want to mark out the area that you're going to be working in, try to outline it with some paint or something like that.

If you are doing any kind of digging with with heavy equipment, you are required by law to call before you dig and locate utilities. This is also a good idea to do even if you're doing just work with a shovel. We did the same. We did the call before you dig when we did that rain garden here on campus. It's just a good thing to do to make sure everybody knows what's located where. And then plan for the labor. So you saw my the group of students that were working on that rain garden.

You'd be surprised how how heavy dirt is, how hard it is to dig it out sometimes. So if you've got a goodiz garden, it can be a lot of work to remove that soil that you need to to make that depressed area for that water to collect in. So sometimes you might need equipment or um sometimes you can manage it on you know with with hand labor. So I uh I have been known to get creative with labor. I am not above you putting the kids to work.

So this was a little mini mini rain garden training that I did at a school with one of my colleagues up in Stafford. So uh we put the kids to work. We had them move the plants over to the site and did some digging to get that ready. Uh this poor girl was on crutches in a cast. I didn't care. I put it to work right there. So, uh, the other thing you may want to take into consideration, so Siobhan, I know you're gonna and Veronica, you're going to be thinking about this for your garden that's going in at Earth Place this summer.

So, you need to make sure you select an appropriate site supervisor for that work. So, typically, this is me, okay? This is my job. Um, yeah, you really need to make sure you've got the appropriate fruity drink in hands to do this job, right? Okay. Uh, that is an old picture. As you can see, I have a lot of hair right there. there. I just realized uh yeah, that was taken quite a while ago. Okay, back to the serious stuff here.

So, here's an example. This was at the old Sabbrook Library. So, we've marked that area out. The utilities were marked out and we had a little workshop there that day. So, we had some master gardeners working with us. So, we stripped the turf off the surface there. So, again, you can see that little mini dumpster that's there. all that that turf and the soil then that needed to come out of there was moved into that dumpster.

The town used it someplace else. It was still good soil to be that could be used someplace else, but it needed to be moved somewhere and it was heavy work to be done. So, at this point now, when you've excavated the the bowl for your garden, it's really important at this point to make sure that you only have foot traffic in there. So, if you have used equipment of any kind for the garden, you make you want to make sure at this point that you don't drive that thing in there at all because that soil will be compacted on the bottom and it will not function properly.

So, on to the plants. I mentioned this before, the plants that are used in rain gardens are ones that are native to this area. So, in our app, that state selector is in there on purpose for the plants because the plants might change depending on where we are geographically. But there are plants that are found around the outsides of wetlands in this area. So, they're what we call faculty wetland plants. So, they can tolerate having wet feet sometimes, but they can also tolerate drying out at other times.

So, they don't you're not you don't want to have plants that are going to be in the middle of a wetland that are that like to be wet all the time because that's not what we're trying to create here. Remember, we want that water to sink in and dry out in between storms. So again, that same plant selector is on the website if you'd like if you want to check it out there or it is available in the app as I said. And then you can do some selections in here too with the type of plant, perennial versus tree, shrub, that sort of thing.

Sun exposure and even bloom color. So here we are back at our site in Old Sabbrook. So, we have excavated that site as we showed. At this point, we're laying out plants and thinking about the placement of those plants just like you would with any other landscape area. So, this at this point, it's really no different than an installation of plants for somebody's garden at their house. Not a vegetable garden, but you know, like a perennial garden.

You want to think about how the height of plants, where you're going to be viewing it from. You don't want tall plants to block shorter ones. You may want to think about how things are blooming, when they're blooming, as I mentioned before. You're thinking about the timing of blooms, so you you can maybe have stretch out your bloom season in that garden. So, those are all things that are really not unique to the rain garden.

You're going to be doing that for a perennial garden, too. But those are important things to take into consideration with this as well. Also, at this point, if you've removed that that soil and excavated down, so if you if you're planning for a 6-in deep garden, usually you go a little bit deeper, an inch or two deeper, because we're going to be putting some mulch in there, as I'll show you. But if you get down and excavate that soil, if you have a wellestablished site, the soil will typically still be pretty good at that depth.

If you have a newer site that's been that has construction that happened in recent years, you may not have very good quality soil as you get below about 12 in there. So you may want to add a little bit of compost around those plants just to help them get established. So here are a few plants that we've had some good success with in the gardens that we've installed. So New York ironweed is a real nice one. There's the Latin name for you, Vernonia Novaorensus.

The main reason I selected this at the beginning was because I like purple flowers, but it turns out this thing does really well in rain gardens and um it it's just performed very well for us. Here's another one that uh is a really nice aesthetically appealing shrub. So, this is a woody shrub, winter berry, and um as you can see, it has those really nice ben those nice berries on there. So, in addition to looking pretty for us, they also provide food for wildlife through the winter.

So, we have some of these in our installations on on campus and we see the the birds utilizing those throughout the winter. It's a really nice ecosystem benefit that you can provide. Here's another great one. Switchgrass panacum veratum. This particular variety is called Ruby Ribbons. Was actually developed by a professor at Yukon. And actually, Veronica, this I'll have to check. I think this one may be deer resistant.

So, that's this is a nice one. It doesn't have pretty flowers necessarily, but it's it's a nice looking plant to use in the rain gardens. They hold up really well. And there are quite a quite a few different varieties of this that do have some variation to them. This one has that red striping in it, which looks pretty nice. I'll double check that for you, though. So, once you've got the garden in, you will want to place some finely shredded bark mulch in there.

So, this is the the finely shredded part is really the important piece here. You don't want to use like the coarse bark nuggets or pine bark nuggets or anything like that because they tend to float up when you get water in there and float away really. So, uh, you want to pay attention to where that water is getting into the garden. If you have a pipe that's got concentrated flow like this, sometimes you'll need to put stone in there.

You saw that on some of the other gardens that I put in showed you at the beginning there that we've put in. That stone helps to reduce erosion potential and it provides a nice aesthetic benefit. So, this is a little quick time lapse for you of some of the one of the gardens we put in down in Hatam. So, this will oop, sorry. And there you go. So, this will show you start to finish what it looked like. So, there's some of the stone.

Got the mulch delivered, ready to go. Our tools, plants on site, a little bit of extra compost, getting the getting the water source over there to that center island. And here we go. So, stripping off all of our turf. See a lot of people working there. A lot of wheelbarrows going back and forth. Stripping digging the soil out. Now, there's always rocks. This is New England after all. So, we took those rocks and used them as a feature in this garden.

Laid out the plants, put the mulch in, put the plants, dug the plants in, then put the mulch. There you go. Makes it look super easy here. This was an entire day's work condensed into about a minute and a half. So, there you go. It's easy. See, it's not that easy, but it's okay. It's not that hard either. Okay. So, everybody gets excited when a rain garden goes gets installed. The students were so excited that day and it's it's really a nice bonding team building type experience and it's very satisfying to work on.

Uh but here's the part that is like the the the non sexy part of the rain garden. All right. Everybody likes to be there when it goes in and feel good when you go home. But 6 months later or a year later when you come back and it's full of invasives or it's all clogged up because something happened and it got eroded. That's the part that nobody wants to really think about, but it's a really important piece. So maintenance gets off that's overlooked, but it's really important to take care of.

So in the first few months, I mentioned that these plants are native to this area. So once they're established, they won't need to be watered or fertilized. But while they're getting established, you got to water them just like any other plant so they can get off to a good start. Early on in the first few months, you also want to inspect for weeds and invasives at least monthly. Make sure they're not taking hold in there.

Also, you want to check for early erosion problems to help avoid having something like this that happened after a year. You know, this could have been caught very early on and avoided this big problem here where this sediment filled up that whole basin. Once it's established on an annual basis, you want to inspect for weeds and invasives at least annually. The plant size and shape is really up to you. This is an aesthetic thing.

I would say habitat-wise, it's probably better to let plants grow as they want to grow. You can select varieties that will be smaller. You don't have to plant trees in there. If you don't have a lot of space, you can plant smaller perennials and shrubs to keep it small and tight. If you have a lot of space and you want a tree to grow in there, you can do that, too. But that is really just about the aesthetics. That is up to you how they're how they're managed shapewise.

The other important thing here, you can remulch it annually. That's typically done to help keep weeds down and help maintain moisture, to keep the moisture in and keep it from drying out. But you want to make sure that the storage is maintained at that point. That you're not filling it up with too much mulch. That's that can happen. And you want to just take a look at where water is coming into and leaving that garden and making sure that it can still get in and that it's not eroding anywhere.

Those are other important factors. So I've already shown you these sites here. So there's our Nemo site and the app page. So this just listed again here for you. And that is it. I'm happy to answer other questions if anybody has them. Let's see if I can see the chat here if there's anything in there. Yeah, I'll I'll unshare the presentation now if that's okay. That way I can see everybody better. So from Mark and Susan, how would you construct a rain garden on a slight grade?

So that's a good question. So on a slight grade when you're when you're removing some of that soil to uh to to you know to make the the storage area for the garden you can build up the downs slope side a little bit. It's called just making a burm on there as long as it's not real steep. You can get away with that. So like a a slight pitch to the yard. You can build a little bit of that soil on the downslope side. We've even taken the grass that we the turf that we cut out of that garden and placed it on that burm to help reduce erosion potential.

So, that is a way to manage it. If you've got a little bit steeper grade, that garden that I showed you that had the two stone walls, that can be a way to use like a like a tiered garden to help control that water and keep it from washing down too quickly. That's what you want to avoid on the slope there. But if it's real steep, it can be challenging. I mean, it can be done, but then you get into real you get into a lot more uh you know, landscape work that needs to be done.

Have I tried using any plants in rain gardens that just did not work? work and that surprised me. That's a really good question, too. So, every site is different and even if you've done your work ahead of time and made sure that your soils are appropriate and can handle that water and you've thought about the sun and the shade and tried to select plants that were appropriate for your site. Sometimes there are still microclimates on a on a site that will favor certain plants over others.

And I generally try not to fight nature. I I let plants select for what likes to be there. So you you know if you find that one particular variety that you planted isn't doing so well and another one is that that's okay. You know don't get disappointed with that. You can try replanting and see maybe it was just that variety of plant. But sometimes those microclimate issues can can cause some of the those species to do better than others.

So you can try to work with what seems to do best at your site. Guess that's the best advice I could give. Can't beat him, join them. I guess that's what that boils down to. So, Greg, I'm working around a lot of Lolly pines. Should I avoid letting the needles build up or or leave them? The soil has good drainage and is a tad acidic. I need to amend it. So, I would say you don't want to be so close to the pine tree that you're in like the drop zone for the needles because you're going to disturb the roots if you put a garden in there.

So, generally, I probably I probably should have this in that beginning part of Thank you for asking that. You want to make sure you're outside of your the drip line of larger trees. You don't want to be digging underneath that because you're going to be cutting into those tree roots and and affecting the tree. So, generally try to stay out away from that drip line. If you do get some blowing of those needles, I I wouldn't say that's the end of the world.

Um it might affect the plants that survive well in there if that soil does is more acidic. So, that may be something to think about, but I wouldn't see any major issues as a reason not to do it there. Good question. I guess I missed one here from Nicole. Is there a minimum or maximum number of plants you would use for a given area or does it depend on the size of the plants when they mature? Yeah, that that same thing applies similar to how you would do it for a regular perennial garden or something like that.

It's and there are economic factors that go into that as well. The cheaper way to do it is to get smaller plants, sometimes just plugs, you know, the real small plugs and, you know, plant them more closely together and with the thinking is that they'll fill in over time, but it takes you a little more takes those plants a little more time to really grow up and to look like much is happening there. So, that's more economically practical probably for the short term.

But putting in those bigger plants, those those more mature plants, gallon, two gallon size, makes it look like something right away. and gives people, I think, a little more of that initial satisfaction that that you want when you see that garden go in. So, if you I guess that's the recommendation I would give. If if you can swing it, if you've got the money and the budget, try to do the bigger plants off the bat. It it makes it look nice from the beginning.

And like that that garden that we put in at the uh at the dairy bar that I mentioned, we put in, you know, one to three gallon plants in that one. And that thing filled in really really nicely just in that first growing season. And we had lots of pollinators coming in there. So, I I would do that as much as you can, but the rest of the spacing tighter together, the plants won't grow as big. You space them a little bit further apart, they'll grow a little bigger.

I would generally follow the guidance on the plant for that that type of stuff. Anything else that I missed there, Siobhan? I think uh the very first question um is there a use for rain gardens along a permeable driveway and or away from a home? So, do you mean a permeable or impermeable driveway? Uh, I'm guessing impermeable. Can you clarify that for me, Danka? Because if you have Well, either way, I guess no, permeable.

So, in other words, I don't have an issue. But I still have a lot of um uh rain I still have a lot of rainfall along the driveway. It It hurts. It's permeable, but there's still a lot of runoff. Yeah, it this is what I generally tell people. It's really about keeping the water on your site as as best you can. So, if that water's leaving your property and and there's a way that you could put in a rain garden to try to capture some of that, that's great.

So, there are other like you know, I'm going to be honest with you, my my mother knows the work that I do here. She know like she's seen these presentations and she comes to my house for dinner and she said, "Why don't you have a rain garden at your house?" I said, "Well, yes, it would be nice to use it as an example here, but I the my property is just it's the way that it drains. None of the water leaves my property, so I don't I don't need it.

Like the water comes off my roof and sinks in in my other perennial gardens. My driveway runs off into the yard and into the woods. Nothing leaves my my property. So, I'm a pretty practical guy. I'm not going to tell people to put it in just because. So, if you can manage your water in a way. Now, my issue is it takes my driveway away and I don't want to be Yeah. So, it sounds like Sounds like you could use it. Yeah.

Right. That's right. Okay. Uh, great. Yep. Okay, that's good. And then, Veronica, I'm sure it depends on plants, but have you had success with rain gardens in heavily shaded areas? Yes, definitely. We definitely have plants on there that that will do okay in shady areas. Yep, you can select that in the plant selector. Any other questions? Uh, if there are no other questions, I want to say thank you so much to Mike because this was wonderful.

I learned a lot and you made uh rain garden buildings sound so accessible, so doable. Uh, so I hope everyone here goes out and thinks about building a rain garden if their site is suitable. Um, and this recording will be uh on Earth Places website. So, if you all need to reference what you learned here tonight or share it with someone else, um you should be able to find it there within the next couple days. Um and yeah, thank you again, Mike.

This is so great. My pleasure. Always fun to talk about it. And please keep me posted with your installation. Very interested to see how you guys do with that. And if you have questions on it, feel free to let me know. That sounds great. Thank you. And thank you everyone for joining us learning with us. Have a good day. Thanks everybody. [Music]