Rain gardens were just starting while i was doing my MG training. Now you see alot of the counties teaching people about them. Good for you to find a way to deal with your drainage problems.
People talked about French drains and pipes and stuff, but I like this idea better. And we have a spring in the back yard that overflows when the water table gets high enough, so it just turns into mush, and I don't know how any other system would do as good a job as this. And I thought that if I could think of a natural way to do this, that would be infinitely preferable, and make real use of the space rather than just having a piece of something installed.
UK robins are smaller than your birds, but equally fond of newly dug gardens. So much so that they'll even sit on the gardener's spade handle watching the proceedings.
Nothing wrong with BIG projects. The tiredness will go away eventually and you'll have something beautiful to look at and continue working on at your own pace. I have a swale in my back yard, and for years I've tried putting trees along the bank to control the erosion caused by one of my farmer neighbors when he does his damming. He's supposed to go no higher than the normal bank, but he's had it at flood stage height for years. This year I decided to try new (safer) places to grow trees that are further away from where I want but hopefully more survivable, but this year the county must have told him he'd be paying for all the damage they've been fixing, so I missed an opportunity to get something closer to the bank. Oh well....there's always next year! I've found it hard to grow things in damp areas unless whatever I put in become weeds.
From what I'm reading, the way to avoid that is to start with weeds! A lot of these plants are pretty, but they're weeds.
I'm also thinking of maybe getting some grasses or rushes from the swampier places around here. I'll have to be observant to see how wet it stays once the garden actually goes in and the soil is improved. If it's still wet, I'm thinking that rushes and cattails around the edges might look kind of pretty!
We have a couple of other swampy parts where we planted weeping willows, and while they don't suck up the water very, very quickly, they're beautiful and they do very well in standing water.
It was so heavy, all waterlogged. And just like walking around in a can of Crisco.
I had shoes on but found that I was spending more energy trying to keep the shoes on my feet rather than getting sucked off in the mud, so eventually I just took 'em off and got the clabber up between my toes. Things went a bit more smoothly after that, but I still reached a point where it just isn't do-able until it dries just a little.
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Plus, it's going to be pretty!
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I have a swale in my back yard, and for years I've tried putting trees along the bank to control the erosion caused by one of my farmer neighbors when he does his damming. He's supposed to go no higher than the normal bank, but he's had it at flood stage height for years.
This year I decided to try new (safer) places to grow trees that are further away from where I want but hopefully more survivable, but this year the county must have told him he'd be paying for all the damage they've been fixing, so I missed an opportunity to get something closer to the bank.
Oh well....there's always next year! I've found it hard to grow things in damp areas unless whatever I put in become weeds.
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I'm also thinking of maybe getting some grasses or rushes from the swampier places around here. I'll have to be observant to see how wet it stays once the garden actually goes in and the soil is improved. If it's still wet, I'm thinking that rushes and cattails around the edges might look kind of pretty!
We have a couple of other swampy parts where we planted weeping willows, and while they don't suck up the water very, very quickly, they're beautiful and they do very well in standing water.
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I had shoes on but found that I was spending more energy trying to keep the shoes on my feet rather than getting sucked off in the mud, so eventually I just took 'em off and got the clabber up between my toes. Things went a bit more smoothly after that, but I still reached a point where it just isn't do-able until it dries just a little.
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