- Hi, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Kris Russen.
I'm the program chair for our Master Gardener talks
for this year and I would like to introduce our speakers
for this evening.
We are tag-teaming tonight.
We have two presenters.
They are both Master Gardeners from our own organization.
The first person who's going to talk is Krista Pfeiffer,
and she's going to talk about her experiences
establishing a rain garden and give you
introductory materials about that.
And then, Margie Hannes is going to take over
and finish up with her rain garden that is more mature.
So we'll start with Krista
and then we'll finish up with Margie.
- I think I'm less mature than Margie, too.
(laughter)
Okay, hi, I'm Krista Pfeiffer,
and before we get started I wanna set some expectations.
I wanna tell you who I am and who I am not.
I am not a professional landscaper,
professional landscape architect,
an installer, I'm not a botanist,
I'm not a horticulturalist, or an engineer,
and I am definitely not a professional speaker.
You guys are scaring me big time here.
So, you'll experience that and I apologize,
but hopefully we'll just keep plugging along.
I like the topic.
I'll tell you who I am.
I am an enthusiastic gardener.
I am an advocate for using native plants
in business landscapes as well as in your home gardens,
and I am a steward of the Earth,
which to me means that it's my responsibility
to leave my small corner of the Earth a little bit better
than the way I found it.
I'm also an accidental rain gardener,
and I'll tell you how that all happened
as we go through the presentation.
(giggles)
Okay, so I wanted to start out with what is a rain garden,
because maybe you don't all know.
It really is just a shallow depression in your garden
that's planted with native plants and grasses,
generally things that have long roots,
that soak up rainwater, and the rainwater is generally
funneled from a roof, or a sidewalk, or a driveway,
so that the water streams into this garden
instead of going into the storm sewer system.
Rain gardens can be large or small.
Mine takes up almost half of my front garden,
so I'm at about just over 200 square feet,
but I'm probably the exception to the rule.
On average what I've found is most residential gardens
are between 100 and 300 square feet.
Rain gardens, they're dry except for when it rains.
So if it's raining tonight, I'll go home and there may be
a little bit of rain standing in my garden,
but if you design your rain garden correctly,
water doesn't stand for more than 48 hours.
We had some pretty good rains last fall,
and I gotta tell ya, two days,
and even if it was full to the brim,
by the start of the third day there was
no longer rain that was standing.
Some people are concerned about rain gardens
being a mosquito breeding ground,
and that isn't the case.
It takes mosquitoes two weeks.
They need two weeks of standing water
to lay their eggs and have those larvae mature
into mosquitoes.
- Your rain garden should be empty in two days.
- So rain gardens are not a mosquito breeding ground.
- So, I'm going to tell you about how I got to be
a accidental rain gardener here.
Last March I had come home from a gardening presentation
and I was super excited.
I was all ready to get out there, it was spring,
it was one of those March days where it was warm,
the sky was blue, the sun was shining,
the birds were singing, so I had to get out there
and prune my Yews.
So I was enjoying spring, and I hear my sump pump
behind me kick on, and I'm thinking,
"Great! The snow is melting, it really is spring!",
and then I heard the sound of rushing water.
Yeah, that's not a sign that you wanna hear,
and I turned around and there's a large puddle
right at the foundation of my house.
So, had a good idea of what had happened,
but we decided to do a little experiment.
Rodney came out and he stood as I ran downstairs
and filled the couple big five gallon buckets of water
and dumped them in the sump pump,
and when it kicked on I ran back outside to find Rodney
standing ankle deep in a puddle of water
right at the foundation.
So we did a little bit of digging,
and we found out that the sump pump line had shattered,
not cracked, shattered, right at the foundation
of the house.
Not what I was going for on my beautiful spring day.
So we did a little digging, figured out where our line went,
creatively rigged the plumbing to get the water
away from the house, and I started to explore my options.
You know, when life gives you lemons,
you make lemonade.
When life gives you a broken sump pump line,
you make a rain garden.
(laughter)
So I reached out to the Village to see
if there were any issues that I needed to be aware of
and ordinances.
So when you're doing this you need
to ask the right questions of the right people,
or if you have a homeowner's association,
you need to ask them to see if they have any requirements
around what you can and can't do.
So I found that the Village of Pleasant Prairie
was very cooperative and more than happy
to support my rain garden as long
as I didn't have standing water.
So he said, "As soon as, if, your neighbors complain,
then you're filling it in and you're done."
But, we have had no complaints, and here's the thing,
if you talk to your neighbors and you get them excited
about what you're doing before you even start,
my neighbors were great.
They were really supportive.
Everybody was really, really interested
in why I had a big old trench down the middle,
of, you know, the side of my yard.
And then, later on, why I had a big old hole
in the center of my yard.
So the benefits of a rain garden.
You're gonna find lots of different things.
Everybody has something that's different.
These are my, the things that are important to me.
I like that I'm not dumping water
into the storm sewer system, where the water
picks up all the pollutants and herbicides
and grass clippings and everything,
and drags it down into the local waterways.
That's important to me.
It also replenishes the regional and local aquifers.
All that water is filtering down through the plant roots
and not going into the storm sewers.
It enhances the beauty,
this slide doesn't have any beauty to show you,
but I really, really think that my rain garden is beautiful,
and I have lots of insects and butterflies and birds.
There's always something going on in my native garden
and in my rain garden, and it provides a valuable habitat
for the birds, the butterflies, and the beneficial insects
that live with us.
The next slide is about the next step,
was choosing the right site.
My broken sump pump line kinda helped me
choose the site for my rain garden,
but there's some things to consider.
You want it at least 10 feet away
from the foundation of your house.
So you have to come out far enough so that,
if there's standing water,
that you're not compromising your house structure.
You need to know where your underground utilities are,
because you're gonna be digging four to eight inches down,
depending on how big your rain garden is
and how much water that it's holding.
Partial to full sun works best.
The sun helps with the evaporation
of the water when there's a big rainfall.
And, I don't have this issue because I'm in the Village,
but for those of you who are in the County,
if you have a septic system, you don't want your rain garden
over your septic system as well.
Those are kind of things to think about
when you're choosing your site for your rain garden.
Contact your local municipalities to make sure
there aren't any local ordinances
that you need to know about
or permits that you have to pull.
Check with your real homeowner's group
if you're in a subdivision, and talk to people.
Let them know what you're doing.
Get them excited about your project.
For choosing the right site of your rain garden,
generally rain garden's are four to eight inches deep,
and you have to take into account lots of things.
Remember when I told you I wasn't an engineer?
This really isn't my favorite part.
You take into consideration the slope of your yard,
as well as how much square footage
is going to be draining into it.
You have to look at your soil type and say,
"Do I have sand or clay?"
It's gonna depend on how quickly your rain garden
processes the water through it.
I have clay in Pleasant Prairie,
and if you've ever dealt with clay it is very slow to drain.
Someone with sandy soil would have that water
going through much quicker than what I have.
And then, like I said, how much square footage
of your roof, or your driveway, your sidewalk,
whatever is feeding the water into your rain garden,
the more square footage
that's draining into your rain garden,
the bigger your rain garden has to be.
I have some copies for you in the back.
This was my go-to manual.
Everything is in here.
This walked you right through how to do it
and the calculations.
I wasn't overly confident in my calculations
for my square footage on my rain garden,
so I also brought in
The Root Pike Watershed Initiative Network.
I consulted with them to make sure that I was doing it right
and that my calculations were correct,
and we were within, Allison's calculations,
she was about five feet smaller in the rain garden,
and an inch shallower.
So my calculations, I would have been fine.
I just lacked the confidence.
This one will walk you through right how
to plan and do the calculations,
for those of you who aren't engineers like I am.
My rain garden supports the rainwater
off of 506 square feet of roof.
I have a downspout that comes
from the central part of my roof,
a downspout from the overhang over my porch,
and then that pesky sump pump.
That is kind of an extra, so I went a little bigger
and a little deeper, 'cause I didn't know
how often my sump pump was going to be running.
Normally, with normal rains, it doesn't kick in much at all,
but I needed to be prepared, and I went a little bigger.
Talk to people who have rain gardens.
I haven't met a gardener yet that didn't like
to talk about their gardens.
And the ones that I've spoken with,
and you guys are a perfect example of this,
I mean, we're more than happy to share information
about what works and what doesn't work.
So talk to people about their gardens
and I'll share with you a little bit
things I would do differently as we go on.
Now we go to what's fun, at least to me,
plant selection and design.
So you have to do just like any garden, your homework.
Your plant selection is going to depend
on your sun conditions, how much you have each day,
what your soil conditions are, again,
is it clay, is it sand,
and spend the time researching
what plants work well in your area.
Like I said, I'm a big proponent of native plants,
part of that is because they're designed to be here.
They don't require a lot of maintenance.
They support the insects and the butterflies and the birds.
They have so many benefits that that's my preference
for a rain garden.
And they have these really deep roots
that help to soak up the water as it's sitting there.
One of the resources that I liked for selecting plants
was the Missouri Botanic Garden website.
They have a section there where you can,
it's called Plant Finder, and you can put in
the common name or the scientific name,
and it will bring you up a picture
of what the plant looks like, and a really good description
of how it likes to grow, what it need to thrive and survive.
Get involved in local organizations, like Master Gardeners,
or talk to Master Gardeners.
Talk to people who have rain gardens,
people who have natives.
There are a few people here in the room
that are part of the Wild Ones organization,
and we're more than happy to tell you
all about the benefits of using native plants
in your landscape.
I'm gonna do a shameless plug.
So if you're looking for these native plants
and you're not sure where to find them,
the Wild Ones chapter has a annual native plant sale.
Kris will send something out in an email to you,
but it's the first Saturday in June,
and we're here in Kenosha,
but we're at the Gateway Technical College
in Kenosha on 30th Avenue.
So if you're looking for native plants,
we've got 'em for ya.
I'll tell you what I have growing in mine.
This is my design, and I have to confess a little bit.
This is the only garden of mine that I've actually
done design work for.
Normally I'm kind of a picker and sticker,
but this is what's growing.
On the next slide I have pictures
so that you can see how pretty native plants are.
Half of my garden is Fox Sedge,
so it's like a grass-looking plant,
and the other half are the native forbs like this.
And I have False Indigo, and Black-eyed Susan,
there's Milkweed and Coneflower,
there's Asters, there's something that blooms
pretty much all of the time.
Right now we're still a little, everything's kind of little,
but I have things that bloom right into the fall.
Plants were the biggest expense in my rain garden.
I planted one native plant for every square foot.
So there's 204 native plants in my rain garden.
At a cost of $700, just over $770.
Smaller garden means smaller expenses.
I'm gonna put in a plug again for native plants
and why I like to use them.
The native plants are designed here
and the birds and insects have learned to rely
on these plants for their food sources
and for their nesting.
And if you are working with cultivars or with ornamentals,
they look beautiful.
There's lots of them that look very similar to the natives,
but they don't necessarily give the insects and the birds
the things, those slight variations that they have
in nectar, in bloom, in when things bloom,
the thorns, the leaves, all of those things
can play havoc on the natural ecosystem.
So, again, just when, if you're looking
to plant native plants, look closely at the scientific name
and avoid the plants who have the third word in quotes.
That's usually an indication that you aren't
planting something that's native.
You're planting something that's a variation or a cultivar.
So, digging.
I told you that I have clay,
like really bad clay.
We started digging our rain garden by hand.
After six hours of digging
in Pleasant Prairie's lovely clay soil,
we had blisters, we had sore backs,
and we had a really small area dug out of our garden.
So we decided if we were going to keep doing this by hand,
it was gonna take us all the way to Labor Day
before we could actually plant anything in the garden.
We cheated, took the easy road, and we rented a Bobcat,
and had the rest of the digging down to about an hour,
and Rodney had a great time playing
with the Bobcat in the front lawn.
So if you're gonna go with renting equipment,
that is also gonna increase the cost of your rain garden.
You can do it by hand if you have the time and the energy,
or you can take a shorter cut and use equipment
to help you get there faster.
It's just a personal preference.
Planting your rain garden.
Mark off the perimeter of your rain garden
and know that you're going to plant your plants.
Again, follow the planting instructions,
depending on what you buy, it's general rule for natives,
is one per square foot.
You guys know all this as Master Gardeners already.
Dig your plants, your holes, bigger and just deep enough
so that the crown of the plant is at the surface.
Fill it in, tap things down to get out any air
that might be trapped.
Water your plants in.
Apply mulch, mulch is another one of those things
that it's worth the time and the investment up front.
The recommendations that I saw were to go
about two inches of mulch, helps with water preservation
in keeping your plants moist that first year
and future years, and it keeps the weeds down.
I'm one of those kind of weird people
that I don't find weeding to be tedious.
I can go out there and lose track of time and just pick.
With the mulch, I didn't really have anything.
That year, a few straggling seeds that came in,
but not a lot of weeding that was necessary.
If Mother Nature doesn't provide the rain,
then you get to do it.
About an inch of water per week for your plants.
My plants arrived Memorial Day.
I took my entire Memorial Day weekend last year
to plant 204 plants, but it was definitely worth it
in what we have growing today.
Maintaining your rain garden.
My garden is just barely a year old.
It'll be a year old Memorial Day weekend.
So I've had the thrill of watching things grow
in spring and in summer last year.
I had the fall.
I left everything stand in my garden.
I like the winter interest, the birds.
There were parties in my front yard all winter long
of different birds coming through
and picking through the seed heads.
It was so much fun to watch who was in the garden,
even in the winter.
And I've had spring now, so I just in the last two weeks
have kind of gone through and seen what came back
and what didn't.
I've done some deadheading.
I've given all my Fox Sedge a haircut
'cause they were kind of brown and shaggy.
Again, it's personal preference whether
how much maintenance you do in the fall
or during the spring.
Minimal watering.
The first year Mother Nature provided really well for me.
I only had to water my plants probably two times
over the whole summer.
I hand-watered, I have a rain barrel.
So I hand-watered all 204 of my plants.
I was very glad to have Mother Nature providing the rain.
The mulch kept the weeds down.
Most of my gardens with natives,
once they fill in, they kind of keep
the weeds down themselves.
It's been very little maintenance,
and hopefully Margie tells you the same thing
when she talks about your rain garden.
I have some resources on the screen for you
and I think we have a handout in the back,
so you don't have to write these all down,
but these were the resources that I used for my rain garden.
Like I said, this one here is from the UW-Extension,
and this was my Bible.
So I would recommend this one if you're interested
in doing a rain garden, and there's copies here
in the back for you.
You can also download them online
if you prefer an electronic format.
Wild Ones has information about rain gardens.
They have some printed literature.
The national website has information about rain gardens.
When you go to different conferences,
you'll see that all different landscapers
have information about rain gardens.
There's a resource there for the botanic gardens
that I used the plant finder that I like,
and my plants are from Prairie Nursery.
I've found that they have a really nice website
and selection.
And if you don't wanna do your plant selection,
Prairie Nursery, as well as other nurseries,
have those pre-planned gardens
where they do all the work for you
and you just plant along with their diagrams.
So they do have different rain garden designs
that are there for different types of soils
and different types of sun conditions.
I hope my experience has been helpful to you.
I have thoroughly enjoyed my rain garden
and I'm gonna let Margie share her experience.
- I, in 2008, went to training at the Four Rain Gardens
with the WIN, Root-Pike Watershed Initiative Network,
and they were doing grants,
so I had to go to three sessions.
And the reason I went to the training
is because when it rained at my house
my neighbor on the east, the water would swell
into my property, and over to the neighbor in the west,
and his property was flooding really bad.
So we didn't want to change,
we can't change the natural swell of it,
so we figured out if we put a rain garden in,
that would help stop some of it.
Plus, this area that you see here,
it was so wet that we couldn't mow it.
So we were out there
with the weed whacker constantly cutting it down.
My rain garden is full to partial sun.
This is the design
that the WIN came up with for my yard.
They figured 75 feet.
I didn't want it any larger.
So you can have a small rain garden.
I have-- They gave me 75 plants,
5 bags of mulch,
which I wound up having to buy more
because as Kris just said you have
to have at least two inches.
I like a little bit more
'cause I don't wanna be out there doing anything.
And plus I had to build a berm around it,
and it cost me $75.
So I don't know if they're still doing that program.
oh, they're shaking their head, no,
but it was very nice.
Okay, this is the design.
It's, as Krista said, one plant per square foot.
I do like a little bit closer,
and they gave me a lot of plants for that area,
so I put mine a little closer.
Those are the plants that are in mine,
the New England Aster,
Wild Blue Flag Iris,
the Torrey Rush,
Marsh Blazing Star,
Great Blue Lobelia,
Winged Lossestrife,
and Prairie Cordgrass,
Ohio Spiderwort,
and Golden Alexander.
And this picture is probably a little bit
after the following year.
It's a little bit hard to see,
but you can see on each side,
those are where I put the Irises,
and they're Wisconsin native Irises,
and they get tall.
The blades alone will come up to my waist,
and they're a very nice purple color.
This slide shows the garden and what plants
are coming up in June, and the Irises are usually
one of the first things that are up.
You can see the prairie grass
and how it takes over the garden.
I probably would next time try to,
if I was doing this again, not put that in
because it just, it choked out a lot of the plants
that I received when I started.
So this year I'm not going to be able to do anything
with the tall that's already there
because the roots are probably 20 feet long,
but I try to stay on top of what's coming up.
This is a side view just to kind of show you
how tall those Irises get.
And my garden, it says 75 square feet,
but I went out there today and I was measuring it
and every year when you start to redo your berm
because I have, it slants, and the back part
where the rain is, that berm will come down a little.
When the rain falls, the berm will come down a little bit.
So every year it gets about two inches bigger.
So right now it's 84 square feet.
(laughter)
And I'll have to put some more plants in,
but I have enough now that I can separate them
and move them around.
This is a New England Aster, and you can see
where the prairie grass has taken over
and it's choking it out.
So you have to be careful with what,
or you have to really know what you're putting in there.
Rain garden fall maintenance, leave it or cut it down.
If there aren't any seed heads on any of my plants,
I get the hedge clipper out there and I do cut mine down.
In back of my rain garden I have tall evergreens,
and we have coyotes running through my yard,
and I want to be able to see when I let my dog out there.
Plus, it's easier for me to take care of
because not always is my husband around to help me.
So if I'm doing it, the hedge clipper comes out.
Just to let you know, we have all our downspouts diverted
into the rain garden by drain tiles,
and we need to keep the debris out of the back channel
because of the downspouts running in,
so I'm constantly back there cleaning that out
so the leaves don't clog it up.
When it fills up with too much water in the spring,
we sometimes have to release the berm
and break it apart so that some of that water can come out.
This is the winter.
I left the seed heads on that year.
I figured the birds would like them.
Plus I kind of get scolded from some people
to leave some of that up.
(laughter)
This is this March, and you probably can't see too well,
but at the back the water was filling up.
And so, I needed to release that.
So we released the berm, and this is on a rainy day,
and the garden can't take any more rain,
so it's floating around in the back there
to the back of my evergreens.
But before that rain garden was there,
all that rain would come around from the east neighbor
to my backyard and it would flood in the back there
where that man has his truck parts and machinery.
So it really helped us.
So what I want to show you here
is a Master Gardener project.
This is this Somer's Town Hall rain garden.
We did not put it in, but we are helping to maintain it.
It was put in in 2012,
and it's 654 square feet.
The Somer's rain garden captures discharge
from two downspouts from the new Town Hall,
and the total infiltration is 26,180 gallons.
So that give you some idea that
it benefits that all that water is not going down
in the drain.
It's being captured right there.
So I like to give little tips.
When I was looking for my plant tags they were all dirty,
so I went, this is my rain garden, so if you come
to visit my rain garden, which you're welcome to do,
these will be hanging in the garage on a little zip tie,
and it's easy for me then to find them,
so I can let you see all my plants.
So I hope you enjoyed this.
(applause)