Fall Rain Garden

Since we sometimes get some leaking in our basement when there is heavy rain, I had started researching the use of rain gardens as a way to help control water flow.  Found a really comprehensive guide through the Wisconsin extension office and ended up purchasing a per planned garden of 64 plants at Prairie Nursery.

Below is how we dug up the front lawn for a an approximate 15'x7' garden.

With all the super dry clay soil, it was really hard work and ended up taking about 4 days working in 1-2 hour stretches, but it finally got dug.  Today, I borrowed my dad's rototiller and added a bit of top soil, manure, and compost to help loosen and enrich the soil a bit.  Then, I laid out the plants according to the plan ( plus 2 additional butterfly weed plants for clay soil that I bought).

Tomorrow, I am hoping to actually put them in the ground, since this Thursday there is an 80% chance of rain, so we'll get to try it out for the first time.  It will probably take a couple years to get established, but I'm really looking forward to having a beautiful low maintenance native prairie rain garden.  I am hopeful it will attract butterflies, dragonflies, and birds that we can watch from our upstairs balcony.

I also bought a Nannyberry tree, which is supposed to have pretty white flowers in the spring and raisin like berries in the fall/winter, but we haven't finalized the location, but I was thinking of putting it by the back corner of the house. You can see it's starting to turn pink below ( you can also see the new spicebush starting to turn golden yellow behind it.)

Since it's been a while since my last posting, I'm also including a few pix of the bird feeder /climbing vines pot with cranberry honeysuckle and pink and purple clematis.

Our mysterious pumpkin vine that planted itself.

And a few pictures of the square foot butterfly garden and limelight hydrangea starting to turn pink.