Beginner Gardening: My New (albeit weedy) Native Rain Garden!, 1 by greenbunny

greenbunny wrote:
OK, so it's far from perfect. We're super broke, and I can't believe I did this at all with my two year old running around, but here it is.

Actually, I wasn't planning on it being a raingarden - it's just that I bought a 5 plants at a once-a-year sale that said they wanted WET (or mesic wet) before I was completely sure of our soil type (i know, awful!), and I just figured they should go by the rainspout. Then I realized that I needed to keep the water within the area, so I turned a completely flat area into hills and a valley.

I was planning on putting mulch down, but then a native landscape designer talked me out of it when I went on a tour. I asked why there was no mulch, and he said you just have to plant MORE stuff, so that it becomes it's own mulch (low-lying for shade). He pointed out that there isn't shredded woodbark underneath flowers on a native prairie. Plus I needed more items to root and hold the new hills in place. Any mulch would just wash away.

I wish I could have hired someone to help me do this, but you gotta start SOMEWHERE!

There are 27 native forbs and grasses in here, not counting the native common violets that I left in (or the tiny weeds underfoot).

They are:

2 - Cardinal Flower (red)
3- Tall Bellflower (campanula americana) (purple, 6' max)
7 - Monkey Flower (mimulus ringens) (light blue, 4' groundcover)
2 - Turtleflower (white-yellow)
2 - Prairie Alumroot (white)
5 - Brown Fox Sedge grasses
4 - Sweetgrass
2 - Mini Palm Sedges

So any advice? Any comments?

I need to do a little tweaking on the levels at the very end, because it's too low and the plant is so small, and it keeps getting submerged. My advice for anyone else in the future is to use a 2" x 8" or long plank, and step on it to level out the soil underneath. And I should have made it have a slight slope downwards from left to right since water starts at the rainspout.

But I am thinking about changing that - might throw up a piece of PVC tubing on shelf brackets alongside the base of the siding with holes drilled into it, with some sort of flex tubing to attach the two. That way, the water would be distributed more evenly.

Oh, and I'll post a pic of it with rain in it next. Just can't have 2 pics in one, and I made the "panoramic" before it rained.

Peace!
Carrie Anne