Four steps to building a rain garden

Go on a rainy day hike . . . find out where the water from your driveway and gutters ends up.
A rain garden acts like a native forest capturing this rain water, slowing it down and allowing the water to percolate down into the ground. Compare this action to our common cul de sac where rain generally runs off of the sloped driveway skirts into a storm drain, travels through a pipe and is dumped into the closest stream, lake and ultimately to the Puget Sound. Two reasons the former is a better picture.

1. We need water to be in the ground . . .so we can pump it up. We all drink groundwater in Kitsap County. The only way that water gets there is through rain fall.
2. Rain fall picks up all the people stuff that we put on the ground and carries it to the Sound. Dog poop, oil from cars, chemicals from lawns all become a soup of that robs the Sound of oxygen. Rain gardens act as little factories, cleaning out this goop before the water travels on.

What is a rain garden?
Rain gardens are simply depressions in your yard. It can be any shape or size and can be planted with a variety of different plants. Want one??? Here are the four steps to get that accomplished.

Locate

• Identify the best location for the rain garden.
• Look for the natural drainage from driveways and downspouts.
• You need to do a simple soil test to determine how good the drainage is at this site.

Design & Build

• Determine the size and shape of the rain garden.
• Excavate the soil - only eighteen inches in most cases.
• Level the bottom of the rain garden - don't let it get compacted.
• Mix compost with the soil that you removed.
• Return and level the soil leaving at least a six inch depression to collect water.
• Create an entryway for the water this can be a swale or even a pipe.
• Create a rock lined over flow for those bigger storm events.

Plant

• Select plants that likes wet feet but that can also survive during the dry summers. There are plant lists readily available. Native plants are ideal, but many other plants work, too.
• Cover the soil with mulch
• Water the plants until they are established.

Maintain

• Mulch as needed to cut down on weeding chores.
• Make sure the inlet and outlet are both clear.
• Don't use pesticides or fertilizers. Remember this water is going to your aquifer.
• Water as needed, but if the correct plants were selected this will be required minimally and only in the warmest of weather.

This project is pretty straightforward, but help is available! WSU has a fleet of Master Gardeners waiting in the wings to help you with your rain garden construction. Also, Kitsap County Conservation District will help you with the costs incurred while building your garden. Can't beat that!

I am building a rain garden myself in late summer. I will let you know how it goes!

A rain garden coming to your own front yard

Imagine a garden instead of that ugly naked water hole behind the chained link fence in your neighborhood! Kitsap County is getting on board with the notion that stormwater collection can be beautiful!

County Commissioner Steve Bauer called a meeting yesterday in the Commissioner's chambers on the subject of the County's Water as a Resource policy. Our county is now finally realizing that rain water has been treated as a nuisance that we need to get rid of rather than the most important resource we have. The new policy is to keep this water on our individual properties, allow it to soak in to recharge our aquifers by using bio retention, or rain gardens. I attended this meeting because I was invited. But, 99% of the attendees were county employees. Many Surface and Storm Water Management operations staff attended. Good idea to get the troops on board! This meeting will be followed up with the formation of , you guessed it, a working group with workshops being held for partners working on stormwater projects.

LID or Low Impact Development is by no means a new idea. Sea Street in Seattle has been around since the late 1990's. Engineers, however, have been hesitant to give the go ahead for projects like these because, well, change comes slow. Risking millions of tax payers dollars on innovative projects is a stretch.

Change in Bremerton
Larry Matel from Bremerton urged the City of Bremerton to take just these kinds of risks. He started his presentation with a quote from Dr. Wayne Dyer, If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Refreshing. Larry talked about projects, mostly pervious pavement projects, that are going on around Bremerton. He lamented the fact that recent CSO (Combined Sewer Overflow) corrections were done old school with parallel pipes. He thinks this could have been accomplished more cheaply and more efficiently using LID principles. He told us about the Manette Bridge project coming up. He muscled DOT into including a LID system of water collection instead piping the rain water falling on the bridge to the Sound. You will be able to see rain gardens and pervious parking strips along Burwell street soon. I'll take trees and plants over curbs and gutters any day.

Using Waste Water
Next we heard about reclaimed water projects by West Sound Utilities in Port Orchard. Manager, Larry Curles, talked about many proposed uses for reclaimed water that would keep our cleaned up waste water out of the Sound using it for irrigation or even in the High School's heat pumps. Larry says that although reclaimed water is expensive, at some point using it will be a real need and West Sound will be ready.

Examples from the Big Guys
Lastly, Tracy Tackett, Green Stormwater Infrastructure Program Manager from the City of Seattle spoke about projects in the city. Bio retention is her number one focus over pervious payment. This translates into using rain gardens as mini workhorses to clean up polluted water and allow it to slowly infiltrate into the ground. She also spoke of the push for using rain harvesting in the city. She talked about the Sea Street Project and other projects in areas of the city without previous formal drainage systems in place. Her experience is that projects that involve residents upfront are, hands down, more successful. Retrofitting areas with established curbs is a little more complicated. People do value their parking spaces! Seattle has a program called Rainwise. See rainwise.seattle.gov. This web site encourages home owners to build a rain garden in their yards. If they are built to city specifications, the city will essentially fund the project.

There was the prerequisite back slapping to close the meeting, but its true Kitsap is being proactive. Art Castle from Kitsap Homebuilders Association is a champion of Low Impact Development. Visit his webpage: Low Impact Development-Kitsap for LID information. www.kitsaphba.org/LID.

You can look forward to a greener more natural approach to living with storm water.