Rain Gardens and Edible Landscaping
Welcome to our rain gardens and edible landscaping! This is the area right around our house. We’ll be digging rain gardens to collect and sink the rainwater from the roof. We’ll also be stacking functions by using plants that are edible, medicinal, or otherwise functional in our landscaping
What are Rain Gardens and Edible Landscaping?
Rain gardens are deeper spots in a yard that collect rainwater run off and hold it after a heavy rain. This gives the water time to soak in and provides more water underground for plants to use later. Plants in a rain garden must be specially adapted to spend some of their time in soggy ground and some time in dry ground.
Edible landscaping is when we include edible plants as decoration or function around the house. In permaculture, we want to make sure to “stack functions”, which means that we will make sure that each plant does multiple things for us. One plant in our landscaping might shelter the house, prevent erosion, AND provide us an edible or medicinal harvest.
Our Rain Garden/Edible Landscaping Design Plan:
You can see our first attempts at rain garden and edible landscaping design here. This will change a lot once we see how the space actually looks.
Here are some of our ideas for this space:
- Wind breaks from the Northwest (where the worst winter winds come from)
- Rain gardens between the house and driveaway with feeder swales leading rain through them
- Medicinal and edible plants on the North side of house with berries along the Eastern side
Rain Garden / Edible Landscaping Timeline:
Pre-Construction
