Watershed Stewardship Program's Wildlife & Rain Garden Blog

Building a Residential Rain Garden 🍃 So, you want to build your own rain garden. Lucky for you, it isn't a painstaking process and once you've finished it, you'll find your yard to be prettier and more efficient than it was before! Why Should I Build a Residential Rain Garden? Well, not only is a rain garden a way to beautify your yard, but also a way to employ the use of natural processes by... Temporarily holding and soaking in rain water runoff that flows  Removing 90% of Nutrients and Chemicals Removing 80% of Sediments  Draining 12-48 hours to prevent the breeding of mosquitoes  Preserving native vegetation Providing wildlife habitats for birds, butterflies, and insects Okay, I want to Build a Rain Garden. Where Should I put it? Where Should I Not put it?  When you are building a rain garden it is important to keep these points in mind about where and where not to build : They should be located in low lying sloped areas so water ...

Storm-water, as the name suggests, is the water that comes from a storm. When storm water reaches the surface, it has three fates. It can collect, infiltrate, or run-off. But for people  that live in urban landscapes with a lot of impervious surfaces, we usually deal with water that runs off. This can play a large role in water pollution as the run-off contains oil slick and debris from roads and fertilizers, pesticides ,and insecticides from vegetation maintenance. When these compounds find their way into our water sources they can disrupt the aquatic ecosystem and compromise the integrity of our water quality. How Does a Rain Garden Help with These Issues? Rain gardens are strategically placed to help capture polluted run off from entering our water streams. It acts as a bowl where the run off collects, and the water slowly enters the ground. The techniques that are used for this process in a rain garden can be further explained by informational signs that are located th...

A host garden provides the food plants for caterpillars and nectar sources for adult butterflies. Most species of butterflies feed on specific plants when they are caterpillars.  Our Host Garden provides host plants for the Monarch (milkweed), Gulf Frittilary (passion flower), zebra swallowtail (paw paw), pipevine swallowtail (pipevine), black swallowtail (fennel, dill, parsley). Host Garden: if you plant it...

 Purple Coneflower  Butterfly Weed  Oakleaf Hydrangea  Pipevine  Passion Flower  White Coneflower  Gaura  White Monarda  Woodlander's Blue  Creel's Gold Hypericum  Common Ninebark  Hydrangea  Bronze Fennel American Pokeweed Prunella   Mexican Hats  Rue  Sedum  Society garlic  Pink Monarda  Creeping Thyme  Sunflower (courtesy of the birds)  Bottle-brush Buckeye  Daylily  Gayfeather  Daylily   Aster  Sweet Pepperbush  Black-eyed Susan  Joe Pye Weed  Blazing Star Liatris  Salvia microphylla  Bald Cypress  Paw Paw  Milkvine  Common Milkweed ...