The brevity of this post diminishes the enormity of the physical labor involved in this project. While Jake has been on furlough this summer he is going all out with the home-improvement. Several of the projects on his list have involved hardscaping for the yard, and this post features our new rain rock garden already in progress.
Our yard is nearly level, but there is a depression that divides our two lots leftover from buried tree-stumps and debris from a time before we owned the property. Water tends to pool in this area after a heavy rain, and with a dog in the mix, becomes a muddy terrible mess. Instead of re-grading almost an entire acre, we decided to work with the puddle and make a rain rock garden. You may have heard of a rock garden for drainage: rocks let water pass through them quickly and there’s no flora to drown or dirt to make mud. You may have heard of a rain garden: a collection of water-loving or water tolerant plants to make use of pooling water. We have combined the two concepts.
This is the rock portion of the rain rock garden. A collection of trap rock and river stones arranged to mimic a stream, with the purpose of catching and draining a deluge. The project involved a tremendous amount of digging, moving of earth, laying a weed barrier, and then of course moving thousands of pounds of stone. We did this all ourselves, with Jake doing the lions share of the labor because I’m still working full time!
Next year, or maybe this fall if we’re under lock-down again, we’ll do some planting around the edges. We have a Japanese maple ready for transplant as well as daylilies and irises to spare. I also bought a creeping thyme seed mat that I’d like to sew along two or more banks. Ironically, we haven’t had a heavy rain now in months. Clearly, the rain rock garden is working already.
