When It Rains
A couple of years ago, we bought a new (to us) house. We love this house, but it has been a trial, in part because it is actually a very old house (more than 100 years) and in part because the people we bought it from flipped it and made some… questionable decisions that they probably should have divulged to us before purchase but that is neither here nor there.
Suffice it to say that we bit off… if not more than we can chew, then definitely more than we expected to.
One thing we planned from the beginning, though, was to turn part of the yard into a rain garden. The house sits on a fairly large lot, and it also drains runoff from several neighboring properties. All of this drains to a low spot in the front yard that is basically a swamp for a very long time anytime it rains. Perfect for a rain garden!
Grace used to work in water quality, and rain gardens have always been a topic that they were passionate about. However, we never really lived anyplace with a yard before now.
Therefore, the rain garden was always on the table, but various factors have forced our hand into undertaking it sooner than we had expected – and with some unforeseen hurdles. So, for the last several weeks, we’ve been hauling compost and mulch (thankfully, we can get it from the city for free), planting an array of native plants, and a whole lot more that I don’t need to get into here.
It has been exhausting and stressful but also sometimes rewarding, and it might have been more pleasant had we not been trying to beat a projected storm front that was on its way.
We also had to have that whole side of the yard re-graded (tangential to the rain garden but directly related to the overall drainage situation which the garden is partially trying to address), which meant it was all bare dirt.
Then, over the last couple of days, that projected storm front arrive and the Kansas City area was hit with a string of powerful thunderstorms which dumped quite a lot of rain on us very, very quickly, turning that side of the yard into a muddy mess. (The storm also dumped a neighbor’s tree through their fence and onto our yard. Their fence is a casualty, but there seem to be no others as yet.)
So far, the whole drainage scheme seems to be working more-or-less as planned, though it was a hell of a stress test on our not-yet-established rain garden. We’ll see how it survives!
There’s not really any payoff to this, save to say that we’ve been very busy with offline things, and they’ll probably keep us very busy for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, though, eventually the rain garden will thrive, and I’ll be able to share pictures that look a little less like a giant mud puddle.
