rain gardens

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Lily left the valley
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rain gardens

Post by Lily left the valley »

Does anyone have one, or does anyone plan to make one?

We're hoping to, but I need to get some more info from the town first. I'm hoping (perhaps unrealistically) that maybe they have a plan in place for such in the downtown areas, and maybe I can work from their plans. I found a few guides both national and regional, but there's still learning to do.
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Manalto
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Re: rain gardens

Post by Manalto »

Urban runoff is a serious source of water pollution so savvy municipalities are finding ways to mitigate; I wouldn't be surprised if they do have some guidelines in Gardner. (I wouldn't be surprised if they don't, either.) Don't forget Tower Hill in Shrewsbury as a source.

My house has no gutters, so the foundation will be a rain garden of sorts, and at 70" of precipitation per year, that's no small thing. There are some great choices in that zone (8b) so I'm looking forward to lush vegetation all around. I'm going to try Cyperus papyrus 'Little Tut', a dwarf form of the papyrus that grows along the Nile, Colocasia (elephant ears) and Alocasia (caladium).

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Lily left the valley
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Re: rain gardens

Post by Lily left the valley »

Manalto wrote:Urban runoff is a serious source of water pollution so savvy municipalities are finding ways to mitigate; I wouldn't be surprised if they do have some guidelines in Gardner. (I wouldn't be surprised if they don't, either.) Don't forget Tower Hill in Shrewsbury as a source.

My house has no gutters, so the foundation will be a rain garden of sorts, and at 70" of precipitation per year, that's no small thing. There are some great choices in that zone (8b) so I'm looking forward to lush vegetation all around. I'm going to try Cyperus papyrus 'Little Tut', a dwarf form of the papyrus that grows along the Nile, Colocasia (elephant ears) and Alocasia (caladium).
I hadn't even thought to look at average precipitation rates yet. I was still fiddling with the sq ft of roof ratio for garden size. I look forward to seeing what you plan overall for that when you get to that stage.

I'm hoping Gardner has some guidelines, but time will tell. We only have a gutter along the front porch line of the house. I have not yet been under the porch, although one side is currently completely open. The front and west sides of the porch still have shingles down to the ground except at the open wood stairwell. I've not noticed puddles under there yet from what I can see, but I do suspect, given some water gathering in the cellar on the north that it also is not sloped properly.

The rear (south) has concrete pads on the east side that apparently originally were angled away, but settled, so some of them now go towards the house. When we had our inspection, he told us if we gutter all around, we wouldn't have to worry so much about which way they go. We're still not sure we want to do that, though.

On the east side is either beds or leftover asphalt from the driveway that they led right up to the foundation towards the back half of the house. They also made a concrete pad at the base of the stairs, and then there are cut stones in a further sort of extension of that as well.
Image
They did not angle any of that away at all, so that's another place we've noticed seepage inside. We're actually wanting to change that porch so that the stairs face the garage. That side porch needs work, as whomever built it (it seems a recent rebuild) did not know what they were doing in many regards. The way the landing boards were lain actually encourages water to gather, and caused issues with the sill and water intrusion into the dining room on the other side.

The west side is buried if there is anything under there at all. The soil has built up almost equal to the top of the wood sill of the cellar windows. (I mentioned this in my general garden thread.) That wall and the one sw corner in particular seems to be the worst of the water intrusion. I blame the sloped roof on the cellar door jut out, as seen here:
Image I recently noticed when it was built, they didn't do the greatest job marrying it to the main exterior, but that could also be problems getting the AC siding fitted there. The jut does have the original wood siding under it, although I can't tell if it was built later but before the AC. (I'm guessing, based on our garage, that's when they did the AC.) There's an AC tile (or two) missing there at the meeting point, and no sign of flashing at all along that roofline. It's on my list of things to check when the weather clears, actually. I noticed recently on a patch job of the plaster in the office (the room behind that exterior seam) there is what looks to be a plaster washer repair that wasn't mudded over properly. So I bet that there has been some water intrusion in the past, and worry it could happen again.

I'm hoping that when we change that slope with the walapini there it will help mitigate, and of course when (if) that's added, we'd properly grade away from that add on. I guess they thought it best to slope that way because there was a bed next to there, and if they sloped it south, it might encourage water down the stairs.

Because of the front yard slope, I'm having some trouble finding a good size area. Because we have the gutter system there, that already collects all the north water, so that would be easy to divert.

We're actually thinking of having two smaller rain gardens as a result of how our roof is sloped, where the back rain garden might feed into a natural water feature. I've been doing a lot of research on how to have a created water feature without a pump system that won't stagnate.

I've been watching for puddles with all the rains since the snow melted, and so far, we really don't get any. The cellar does get water, but it's very little, and travels right to the sump. There's only a few spots on the west side of the dirt floor that have had even the slightest of puddling at the worst of times so far. The dirt hasn't been raked in who knows how long down there, so the water has shaped it over time. There are portions on the east side that have concrete pads, below the boiler, oil tank and laundry area. The walls themselves don't show weeping signs, but there is an area near the first cellar door before the stairs out where you can see they replaced just outside the frame, and the bulk of the cellar water comes through there. This is the same spot where the jut directs to.

I have some sites with suggested natives for the rain gardens, but haven't made decisions since we're still observing and waiting to hear back from the city about a few things.

City Hall will be open on the morrow, and I have some offices to visit for various reasons. So I might have some answers by then.
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Re: rain gardens

Post by phil »

I think when most of our houses were built. the sewer was often also the storm drain. mine have been separated since, I dont' know about other areas. It requires digging up the streets for a separate pipe.
mine is on a hill so It doesn't really flood and the water just leaches into the soil but they gave me a deep hookup so I could dig in some deeper storm drains. I think it has them but probably at least half full of mud by now. They dug such a huge gravel pit out front, and covered it that it really isn't an issue. They didn't' seem concerned that my lot had no pipe leaving for the storm drain , it gets there anyway. the height of the storm drains can limit how deep you can dig if you ever want to go deeper with the foundation. in some cases that limits the number of storeys you can have on the lot and it can affect the potential thus the resale value. Usually there are height limitations as well.

I suspect many other people with old houses are also seeing the lines get split into storm and sewer but way back in time it just wasn't a concern at least in more rural areas. Here anyway it was virgin forest 200 years ago and the sewer and runoff was just a single pipe down to the ocean.

Phil

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Lily left the valley
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Re: rain gardens

Post by Lily left the valley »

phil wrote:I think when most of our houses were built. the sewer was often also the storm drain.
Phil, I don't know how the house is set up, but I know Gardner has both. They paint the street drains with those reminders not to dump in them because of our waterways.
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Re: rain gardens

Post by phil »

Lily left the valley wrote:
phil wrote:I think when most of our houses were built. the sewer was often also the storm drain.
Phil, I don't know how the house is set up, but I know Gardner has both. They paint the street drains with those reminders not to dump in them because of our waterways.


likely the more populated areas looked after separating them earlier than they did here since pollution would have been an issue sooner.

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Lily left the valley
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Re: rain gardens

Post by Lily left the valley »

Good grief, I had meant to report back on this thread ages ago and apparently got distracted.

I did meet with the conservation head of Gardner in City Hall. We had a very good talk. As suspected, there is currently no handout for rain gardens or water features for Gardner specifically. I kinda sorta volunteered to help change that, but he still hasn't replied to my follow up e-mail, so I don't feel any pressure on that just yet. I think as we work towards our own water related plans here, I'll have a much better handle on what can work or not here as well. I'm still trying to find out if anyone local already has a rain garden in place, as the fella I spoke to said they currently did not know of any.

One thing that heartened me is he was very encouraging about the no pump water feature. He thought it was a splendid idea, and is waiting to hear back on my progress towards that goal.

That's part of what led me here, actually, as we've been trying to site that out, as well as incorporate an overflow venue via the dry creek bed we're planning to put into the west strip of our property near the house, as due to the property border rock wall (neighbor's, not ours), there isn't enough room to do a standard angled grade down there width wise. We don't want the hassle of dealing with a French drain the more we spoke about it (and especially after some of the maintenance/followup/disasters I've read about such).

The idea of a dry creek bed is that you build it in such a way that normally, it is dry. But when it rains, it can carry the water to a destination such as a rain garden. Since we do not have guttering on the south or west sides of the house, we think adding the dry creek bed will be the best solution to a tricky problem, and we can also tie it in to the water feature as an overage drain--again, leading to the front rain garden.

So I'm now further researching dry creek bed builds in the hope that we can get started digging as soon as we get the results from the "Call before you dig" folks. As far as we can tell, there's not a lot of chance we'll have problems, but we know ideal--especially in an already tricky situation--is rarely the result. :lol:

One thing I'm trying to figure out is how to start the bed on the SW corner of the house. There's currently a bed there (the one with the safety glass--yes, still!), but from what I've been able to see, no real permanent plants of value there. Because of the slope of the cellar stairs jut out, it would solve one issue with directing the water away from one of the worst offending seepage areas.

One thing I already know about this project? It will require a lot of digging. I also need to figure out where we'll be putting the soil we'll displace as well. We have loads of space for that, but a space still needs to be picked.

It turns out that the many pebbled old play set area of the yard had both rubber and landscape fabric in it. So one of the projects I'll finally be diving into this month is binning up all those pebbles, to find out how much of that underlay is rubber and might be of use for the creek bed. I've also already been keeping an eye out for free rocks on CL. So far, all the ones I've found are very far away. I'll keep checking, as this is the landscape season. We do have some medium sized (as in medium for a single human to carry) rocks on the property I can use for anchor points. I'm more concerned about finding more fit in your palm and small rocks for variety. We'll see what the big dig reveals, as I know I've found a lot so far just from what little gardening I've done that actually involved digging. I'm very glad I have a dirt screen, as it will help a lot with that.
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Re: rain gardens

Post by Jeepnstein »

Geography will play a huge part in your plans. I know in some areas of the West it's pretty much forbidden to retain rain runoff. Water is serious business when you build huge cities in the desert. In the East and most of the Mid West rain runoff is more of a nuisance.

One of the biggest headaches municipalities in my area face is the requirement to split storm drains from the sanitary sewers. It costs millions do do that. We encourage homeowners to divert their runoff to daylight and hopefully slow it's entry into the storm sewers. If you get a big storm runoff in a combined sewer you have no choice but to bypass the treatment plant, and that's bad for everyone down stream. The problem is getting worse as development spreads. We're seeing flash floods of streams that never gave anyone a second thought twenty years ago.

I have a buddy who owns a wonderful little house along a quaint little creek out in the country. His driveway crosses the creek on a four foot culvert. One day it rained pretty hard and he noticed that a neighbor's car had washed into the culvert. The runoff was incredible. There are a lot of new houses with large manicured yards up stream from him that weren't there in years past. Oh, and one with a badly eroded driveway and a missing Honda Civic. That little creek is going to take out an important county road some day. Runoff control is serious business.

Holding your runoff in rain barrels and or a water feature would make sense. As long as you have a plan for where the runoff goes once it fills your storage to the top I don't see anything to stop you. Of course this is coming from a mid Westerner who has water in amounts unimaginable to some Westerners.

I'd recommend studying your yard and drawing up a plan. Then mark your digs with spray paint. Take a couple of days and either hire someone with a piece of equipment or rent one for yourself to do the digging.

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Re: rain gardens

Post by Olson185 »

It's raining fairly heavily and I tell my wife I'm going outside to see how the property is draining; to see if I need to make any changes to the grading, swales, or ground (gutter-like) ditches that tend to need "dredging" with a hoe once or twice a year. Secretly, though, I just like playing in the rain.
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Re: rain gardens

Post by eclecticcottage »

This is something we have been discussing in regards to the wreck of a cottage. It has no gutters and an enterprising po had a new driveway put in that actually goes right to against the house. It is, not surprisingly, causing problems. It is a small lot without storm drains at the road, or curbs for that matter, so the thought is to gutter and pull the driveway back off the house and put in a "gutter" of sorts there as well, then divert that water to the back yard into some sort of rain garden. I have to read up on them more. I did a small amount of research in graywater gardens for the cottage we live in at one point since we are on septic but can't id a good spot.

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