Do you have flooding on the property around your home? Transform it to make your home safer and healthier
If you live in a suburb, water control can be a big problem. We’ve seen where a homeowner will divert their drainage onto neighboring property, or build up their property so that rain runs off into the neighbor’s lot. It’s sometimes even a problem to eliminate standing water in your backyard from your own roofline, without changing your gutters or running long pipes to the street.
Standing water is not only unsightly: it can contribute to mosquito populations, fleas and other insects (flea populations are known to explode after wet weather), and the dreaded “m” word–mold. Plus, if the water is near your foundation, it can cause deterioration of the cement blocks and even seep into your basement or crawlspace, making a mold reservoir in your home!
You could direct the water to the street; sewers were designed to help cope with storm drainage, but what a shame to “waste” perfectly good rainwater when you could also beautify your yard with it. Here’s what to do: build a rain garden or water storage system for your vegetable garden.
This homeowner directed the gutters from his detached garage via underground pipe to a spot where the flooding traditionally occurred, but then added a leach line or “drain field pipe” to the end, and gravel around it, so that water will slowly leach into the ground and not just pool on the top. It’s like adding an underground reservoir from which the plants on the top can draw. This works especially well if the ground has clay; one would probably need to break up a larger area around the pipe and fill it with gravel to make it more able to absorb water.
As you can see, the garden does require some expense: piping, gravel, soil and plants. However, it’s something that a homeowner with a few basic tools can do: namely a shovel and wheelbarrow. The hardest part may be burying the pipe, but that’s not necessary if you build a “rainscape” to channel the water to your rain garden, like this:
Instead of sending it to the sewer, you can send the rain to a nice border garden by the sidewalk, which does the added function of keeping stray dogs (and people!) off your yard.
If you are the gardening type and you live in an area without regular rainfall, you might see the water as a “gold mine” to be saved for watering vegetables or flowers. In this case, you need a storage system–and they don’t have to look like plastic barrels. One company has a “build-a-barrel” system that looks more like a storage box. Others have found ways to disguise the barrel with the garden that it serves, like this:
Source: Turn Your Gutters into a Rain Collector with a Rain Barrel
Whatever you decide to do, it will be healthier than just letting the rain pool and stagnate in your yard, possibly attracting beautiful beneficial pollinators like butterflies, honeybees and hummingbirds as well!
