How to Build a Rain Garden

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By offgrid
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Rain Garden

Looking to plant a vegetable and herb garden but don't know how to get started. That's good - we'll show you where and how to plant a vegetable/herb garden that you don't need to water.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

1 yard of pine mulch
1 yard of top soil
a shovel

Step 1

The whole idea behind a raingarden is to plant a garden in an area of your yard that collects water when it rains. That means finding the lowest point and starting there. If you have an area that ponds you have a bit of digging and reworking so that the garden doesn't flood. In our yard we had a spot that did pond and this is what we did to ensure that water was being redirected to water our plants.
Step 2

We ordered about 1 yard of pine mulch and 1 yard of top soil from the local plant nursery. We then plotted an area about 10' x 10' in the lowest part of the yard. We dug up the sod and moved to one side. We then removed the 6" of top soil that was there and placed the sod upside down and onto the clay. We covered the sod with about 10-20 layers of newspaper to prevent the grass from growing up through the garden. (This is called lasagna gardening and is used to recycle the sod rather than throwing it out.) The sod will decompose and provide excellent organic material for your garden. We asked any neighbors for their sod (that they were looking to get rid of) and again layered more newspapers.
Step 3

The idea is to raise an area so that the ponding water seeps into the edges of the raised bed to gradually water your vegetables. We then mixed the existing top soil to the new top soil and 1/2 of the mulch. We layered this on top of the newsprint so that the final garden was almost 2-1/2' above the surrounding grade. We then planted cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers (seedlings) near the center and herbs and lettuce as we worked towards the edges of the raised bed. We used the remainder of the mulch to cover over any weeds that made there way into the garden.
Step 4

We made sure that we kept pathways into the tomatoes and cucumbers so that we could harvest them as they ripened on the vine. The first summer we had enough veggies and herbs to be eating fresh salads from July to September. The oregano, terragon and thyme are perennials and come back every summer. We let some of the tomatoes and cucumbers fall to the ground and these create new plants every season. The only thing we need to re-plant each year is basil. And we never water. Happy "Rain-Gardening"