The Earth911 Rain Garden Installation Guide

When it rains, water runs off your roof, driveway, and sidewalks, picking up fertilizers, oil, pesticides, and sediment before flowing into storm drains and eventually your local waterways. This cycle wastes valuable water in both directions. A rain garden is a smart solution. It redirects stormwater runoff into a shallow, planted area where the water filters naturally through soil, recharges groundwater, and nourishes plants without using any extra water. A well-designed rain garden can filter up to 90 percent of nutrient pollutants and 80 percent of sediments from runoff. This means less pollution reaches rivers, lakes, and aquifers, helping protect your community’s drinking water. Whether you live in the rainy Pacific Northwest or the dry West, a rain garden turns a problem into a valuable part of your landscape.

Why Rain Gardens Matter for Water Conservation

Rain gardens do more than just make your yard look nice. Across the country, homeowners use billions of gallons of treated water to water their lawns and gardens, while letting millions of gallons of free rainwater run off their property and strain city stormwater systems. Rain gardens help break this cycle in several key ways.

Every gallon of rainwater that soaks into your rain garden is a gallon of treated water you don’t need to use for sprinklers. The EPA’s WaterSense program says that nearly 8 billion gallons of water are used each day in the U.S. for outdoor purposes, mostly for landscaping. Most households use more water outside than for showers and laundry combined. By swapping part of your lawn for a rain garden with native plants, you create a landscape that thrives on rain and needs little or no extra watering once it’s established.

The changes you make to use rainwater in the garden will make a difference immediately, because treating water to potable standards requires significant energy. Extracting, purifying, and distributing drinking water accounts for substantial municipal energy expenditures, as the EPA’s Green Infrastructure Municipal Handbook explains. Reducing unnecessary potable water demand for irrigation helps communities conserve both water and the energy required to deliver it.

Full story click the link:

Click Me