- Several years ago, I went on a tour of rain gardens and shoreline restoration projects, organized by Mary Jo Knutson of the Grand County Soil and Water Conservation District.

She did a really great job and the tour was very interesting to me.

I would like to dedicate today's show to Mary Jo as she lost her battle with cancer last month.

Come along in Mary Jo's memory as we learn all about rain gardens, and their are many benefits.

- [Narrator] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of Truck Country.

Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmers Mutual telephone company and Federated Telephone Cooperative, proud to be powering Acira pioneers in bringing state of the art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yankel Julene in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom Minnesota and By Friends of Prairie Yard and Garden, a community of supporters like you who engage in the long term growth of the series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard and Garden visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(enchanting music) - I really enjoyed my rain garden and shoreline restoration tour in Grant County.

But that got me thinking are rain gardens used in all counties, especially in Stevens county where I live?

So I called up the local Soil and Water Conservation District Office.

And sure enough, they do lots of rain gardens.

I visited with Matt Solemsaas and he just happened to be working on one and invited me to come see and learn.

When there are plants involved, I was quick to say yes.

Welcome Matt - Thank you.

- Tell me, how are you involved with the rain gardens?

- Well, the rain gardening thing is fairly new to Stevens County.

We've only been doing them since about 2011.

It was something that started off in kind of the metro area.

New developments were putting them in as a requirement for stormwater runoff and I went to a couple different seminars and thought that'd be something we could do here.

So we started off with some demonstration, gardens with the city and then implemented a cost share program to bring it to landlords and homeowners in Stevens County.

- Matt, what is a rain garden?

- Well, a rain garden is just a small shallow depression, that does exactly what it says, it collects rainwater, stormwater runoff, it's not a water garden, they get referred to as water gardens lot, we aren't, collecting and holding water, it's not a pond.

It's just a garden that temporarily hold some water for less than 48 hours, let's infiltrate into the soil and looks good in your yard.

It's landscaping, and kind of beautifies the landscape.

- So why are they so useful?

- Well, stormwater runoff is a big deal.

There's a lot of pollutants in stormwater runoff, any kind of hard impervious surface from your roof to your driveway, even your lawn is fairly hard surface.

So what rain gardens basically we divert all that runoff either by a downspout or off of a hard surface into the rain garden.

The water infiltrates into the soil, you know recharges groundwater or else it goes back into the channels.

So we prevent it from getting into the to the rivers preventing that nutrient loading that you see with all the green water.

- How does the water get from the roof into the rain garden?

- Well, we can do it a couple different ways.

Most folks have downspouts on their houses.

So what we do is either directly divert that via tile, underground into the rain garden.

We can do like a lazy river type thing from a downspout if they don't want their downspout buried, or we can do some sloping of the landscape just to divert water into the garden.

- [Mary] How big of a rain gardens or how do you determine the size?

- [Matt] You know, a good rule of thumb, is you take 10% of the area that you're trying to collect the water from.

So if you have 100 square foot roof, you'd want a 10 square foot garden, by rule you have to be at least that big.

Most of the time we make them quite a bit larger, because homeowners want them a little bigger, because they're very aesthetically pleasing.

I mean, you get lots of butterflies and bees and other things that are attracted to these things.

So the rule of thumb, though, is 10% of the size of the area you're collecting the stormwater from.

- [Mary] Can the rain gardens, be in the sun, or shade or doesn't really matter?

- [Matt] You know, it doesn't matter, we can put them just about anywhere as long as they'll infiltrate.

Sun is probably preferable just for the plants.

You know, we deal with native plants, and they like a lot of sun.

There are some shady varieties that we can get.

So a combination of both, you definitely don't wanna put it all in the shade.

But a combination of sun and shade is sufficient.

- Is this something that is just for people in town to collect the surface off the houses and streets and everything?

Or do some of the people in the country have them too?

- Primarily, it's an urban thing.

I mean, but we do do some rural, I would say 95% of the gardens we do are in town, we've done several out on farm sites.

I mean, we've had a couple that I've been pretty unique, off of like a Quonset, a lot of runoff off of a metal Quonset coming into a farm every diverted all that into a rain garden as well as you know, there's a lot of hard surface area on these farm sites with gravel being packed down with machinery.

So we have done some, in some rural areas.

It's not as big of a issue the storm water in the rural areas because of all the farm ground surrounding everything, but we can do them anywhere in the county, city or rural.

(enchanting music) - [Mary] How do you get the word out to people about the rain gardens?

- [Matt] We have a Facebook page.

We also do a lot of radio, you know, different festivals.

The Horticulture Night up at the research station, we've done different fair booths.

We're also part of the Pomme de Terre watershed project.

So we do a lot of advertising that way, newspaper, word of mouth is really the biggest thing though, you get one person in their neighborhood putting on in, everybody kind of inquires about it.

And you know, once they realize that, hey, they have cash, or they'll, you know, pay for a good portion of this forest, they get get interested so.

- [Mary] Well, that was something I was gonna ask about.

What does your office do?

Or how do you help people?

- [Matt] Yep, so we do everything from the design, to the installation, the whole nine yards from the ground up, you know, we go and we'll come out and meet with the homeowner, kind of get their ideas, we'll have our ideas, you know, what they're thinking, take it back, we actually have an engineer do a design, based on, you know, calculating sizes, and then plant materials.

We let homeowners look at that.

And they can if they like purple, if they like red, if they want butterflies, you know, depending on what they're looking for.

We can pretty well tweak these things however you want.

So we do that design, we build the things and then we cost share at all 75% - [Mary] What do you mean by cost share?

- [Matt] So if a rain garden, total cost of a rain garden was $1,000, we would pay $750 of that.

So it only costs the homeowner $250 out of their pocket.

- [Mary] Is that just for the plants?

Or is that for the mulching everything, is that the total package?

- [Matt] Everything, the design is completely free, we will do a design for you and it doesn't cost you anything if you decide you don't wanna do it, that's not a problem.

But the cost share covers, labor plants, edging materials, mulch, everything.

- [Mary] Well, I see they have these pretty bullet edges.

Do you guys put those into?

- [Matt] We do.

Yep, that's part of the program.

And that's kind of the thing we've kind of done in our district.

I don't know if everybody does it this way.

But you can put any kind of edging around these gardens and we like to keep an edge between the grass and the garden itself.

So people like the bullet edgers we've had people do the custom concrete curbing in the past, which we don't do but you know, we'll cost share that sort of thing.

Or you could just do the plain, you know, drive in black edging, but these kind of add another nice little focal point to the gardens.

- [Mary] Why do you recommend edging?

- [Matt] To keep the grass out of the garden from kind of overtaking the garden, we wanna keep as weeds and grass and as much as we can out, you know as much maintenance free as possible.

It's not completely maintenance free, but you know just to keep it from encroaching to have a nice edge.

It looks a lot neater and a lot nicer that way.

- [Mary] And then what kind of plants do you use for the native gardens?

- [Matt] Generally we use native plants almost exclusively.

Part of our rules with our costs share is we have to use native vegetation.

You cannot, to say you can't put your own in, we base everything off of native but you can add some perennials and you can add some other things in here to the gardens that you like but the basics of the garden has to be native.

- I misspoke, I said native gardens and it's rain gardens.

So you can use natives but you can use other things too.

- You can add other things in, correct, yep, you can put a walk path through, you can do stone pass, you can put a bench in or a windmill, mean anything as long as it doesn't impede the function of the garden.

- Man, I used to see the gardens that were much deeper, have they gone to things that aren't as quite as deep?

- Yeah and it all depends upon what how big of area you're trying to catch runoff in, you know, and a lot of times with slope, I mean, if you have a really severely sloped lot, you're gonna need a little deeper pool.

You know, if you have something that's more level, you don't need quite quite the depression in it.

So I mean, these things, you can get a six inch rain, and they're gonna overflow.

I mean, it just it doesn't infiltrate that fast.

But generally you don't, you only need a six to eight inch depression.

- [Mary] When you design these or build these, what is the timeframe that you want that water to sink in?

- [Matt] The water should only stay ponding for up to 48 hours or less?

You know, that's the biggest question we get is, well, I don't wanna attract mosquitoes to my yard, well, this isn't gonna hold any water.

You know, we come and check sites before we really get started, and do what we call an infiltration test.

So we dig down.

And you know, put water in there the time that it takes that water to disappear into the ground.

And we've run some sites that have pretty heavy clay, you know that we have to basically then take out, we dig out that clay and we amend the soil with mulch and sand and things like that to make it drain.

So definitely less than 48 hours.

And if you have lake shore property, we can put a rain garden in those type of areas as well.

Because a lot of times lake shores are slope right down to the lake.

People still like their nice green lawn, you know, it looks good, it's manicured, but you put a rain garden in, that'll stop a lot of that runoff, you know, those plants will catch that runoff before it gets into the lake, take up all those nutrients and prevent it from getting to the lake shore, which makes the lakes turn green.

You know, in late summer when all the phosphorus, nitrogen things like that are getting into the water.

(enchanting music) - [Mary] When you pick the plants, do you try to pick plants that are gonna be nice throughout the growing season?

- [Matt] We do um, there's a lot that goes into picking the plants, you know, we consult with the homeowner a lot.

We have some books to give them ideas of you know, colors and different things.

Obviously, different plants go in the bottom of the garden where could be wet for a short period of time versus what I would call the upland portion of the garden that is dry most of the time.

We do pick different plants based on color, based on timing of the year, you know, they bloom at different times, based on height, a lot of times you know you put your taller plants towards the back so they don't overshadow the smaller ones in the front.

- [Mary] Well, I'm looking behind you and there's actually some grasses included in this planting too.

Why do you use grasses and flowers?

- [Matt] Okay, well, the native grasses like I said, they have a really deep root system.

So they're really, they're the big nutrient grabbers.

I mean, those roots go deep.

And we use a lot of natives, you know, the Indian grass, the blue stems, the switch grasses, you know, they'll get down to almost 12 feet deep with their roots, the forbs don't go quite as deep in a lot of cases.

So the grasses are there to kind of shore up the soil and grab those nutrients, you know, before they run off.

- [Mary] And I'll bet you that they add a lot of beautiful fall color too.

- [Matt] They do, a lot of these grasses look really nice.

The bluestems I mean, they're bright red, and, you know, it just adds another aspect to the garden, to the beauty of the garden.

- [Mary] Can you use shrubs in a rain garden too?

- [Matt] you can use some shrubs, yep, people do use some shrubs a little bit limited because the shrubs tend to get overgrown.

You know, there's a lot of trimming involved with that because a shrub over time, I mean, you leave a shrub in for 10 years, it's gonna be pretty good size, then it'll choke out a lot of other things.

So unless you have a really unique situation or a really big garden, we don't do a lot of shrubs, but you can.

- Are there any city ordinances that you have to worry about as far as height when you're planting a rain garden?

- You know, we don't really run into any problems with city ordinances, we keep everything kind of back out of the right away.

So it's not impeding anybody's view.

You know, they're up against most of the time up against the house.

And, you know, it's in a controlled garden situation, you know, it's not like a lawn that, you know, there's some height regulations.

So, you know, it's like in a controlled area, so we don't have any problems.

And we've done a lot of projects with the city.

So they're, they kind of, we're educating them on the benefits of native plants.

- [Mary] Is there an optimum time of when you should or can plant a rain garden?

- [Matt] You know, we've done them from Spring to fall, it really doesn't make a lot of difference.

All these plants, another good reason for using native plants is they're very hardy.

I mean, you think about these plants in most cases are out on the prairie.

You know, they survive winter, fall, drought, rain, everything so we've planted a lot of plants even in a dormant stage in the fall, you know, no problems with them coming back in the spring because they're just, they're that hardy and you know they're meant to be outside in a on unprotected climate.

- Matt walk us through how you actually do when you come in, do you have to scrape the sod off of an area or how does that work?

- You know in most cases we have an existing house with probably an existing lawn or landscaping.

So what we would do is come in and we really just take a hose we take a garden hose and lay out the contour of the garden, you know and mark it out that way and then we go along and we scrape all the sod off, sometimes the homeowners keep it, sometimes we dump it.

Then we come in until up the site, you know get the soil pretty fluffy and then we do the shaping, you know, shape out the depression and then plant it and mulch it and then also in other cases there's you know the downspouts, we dig in the downspouts with the tile, there are cases where we sometimes use rock like a lazy river instead of digging a tile for having that kind of go down into the depression of the garden and that's pretty much it.

- [Mary] What do you mean by that?

What do you mean by a lazy river?

- [Matt] Well, water is gonna go where it wants to go, you can't really control it and we've actually come back to some gardens where we've planted molds, it's all good and we get a pretty good sized, you know eight to 10 inch terrain and you go out back to the site and you see the garden and it blows the mole child because it's just not prepared for that, so what we'll do is we'll basically make a riverbed without a rock, where the water wants to go because you're not gonna stop it and then put mulch back and you'll come back, so it adds a really kind of unique characteristic to these gardens.

We've been doing it more and more with downspouts even just instead of burying it you know put it in a rock riverbed because it's nothing better than seeing the water kind of run over a little rock riverbed, it looks really nice.

- [Mary] When you plant the plants, how deep do you plant them?

- [Matt] Not very, I mean we plan them just like you would plant any normal plant, you know planting a garden or planting a flower bed there, nothing special, you know, as deep as the root ball basically, nothing deeper because they're you know, when we get them from the greenhouse they're, you know when they're containers that's about we'll plant them as deep as they're on their container.

- [Mary] How much then do you water everything in after you're done?

- [Matt] We usually give it a pretty good watering right after planting but we tell folks you don't have to water it, I mean if it's a super dry area you're probably gonna have to water a new garden, it's not established but once you give these things a year, once they've had a whole growing season, you should never have to water because that root, those roots are going down in the ground and they're they're self sufficient they don't need a bunch of water - [Mary] Put any fabric down at all but underneath the mulch?

- [Matt] No we don't put any weed fabric down, you know that would prevent infiltration of the water and we found with wicked fabric a lot of times it just, it makes more of a mess than it's worth because there's gonna be cracks and there's gonna be seams in that fabric and you're gonna get weeds that are caught through that and it makes it really hard to get weeds out, so you know we find the thicker mulches are much, you know more natural and easier way to do these things.

- [Mary] when you use the mulch, then do you have to add more the next year?

- [Matt] Not necessarily the next year but you will have to amend your mulch, I mean it breaks down over time, you know a little bit and it'll shrink and you know freshening up your mulch once all makes it look kind of pops, makes it look new again so you do have to amend mulch, you don't have to take it all out and bring all new in but you know you add a little bit every couple of years is recommended.

- [Mary] How long does it take for a rain garden to mature and get looking nice?

- [Matt] You know depending on growing seasons and I would see in like a two year span, you could have a pretty mature looking rain garden, depending on if you, you know split your plants and kind of manicure more if you just let them go, you know and get that more natural look, you know, it can be sooner than later a couple years though I would say they look pretty good.

- [Mary] What do you do with the plants in the fall to get them ready for winter or do you need to do anything?

- [Matt] In the fall I would recommend leaving your plants.

Leave the growth there, I mean it protects the roots of the plant, especially in new plantings.

You know they catch that snow and it just kind of blanket some and then I would come around in the spring and then you can clean them up because they'll start new growth that way.

- Matt this is really interesting to see how you start and do all of this.

Would it be possible to see a garden that's more well established?

- Yeah I have a really good example, we could go check out that I actually installed myself.

(enchanting music) - Hi I have a question, I just noticed chickadees in my backyard, what can I do to attract more?

- Well chickadees are a cute little bird that they're around year, they're here year round.

And it's really nice to have a place where they can find a nice nesting box.

This is a new design.

Now they're chickadees, they will nest in April, and the rims come later in May, and the rims will come and chase the chickadees out of their box.

So what has been designed, and what I found to really be successful in my backyard is this little nesting box for chickadees.

The idea is to put a little door on the box.

And as the chickadees lay their eggs and begin to incubate the eggs, what you do is gradually close this little door.

And as you gradually close it, eventually it will be closed pretty much all the way where you want it.

And the chickadees will still be able to get in and out and feel comfortable even though that it wasn't there initially, it's there now, they still feel comfortable enough, they won't chase them away.

Then when the rains come in May, instead of chasing the chickadees out of the box, when I turn this, I can show you that rims always build their nest with sticks.

So when they come and wanna get into this box, they have a stick and the stick won't fit through the hole.

So they will leave the box alone and let the little chickadees have their babies.

And when the babies hatch and are getting ready to fly, you just open door a little bit for them.

And outcome the loop chickadees, a great way to protect chickadees, to have chickadees in your yard nesting.

And you can also have boxes like this where the rims can come.

So you can have both rains and chickadees at one time.

- [Narrator] Ask the Arboretum Experts has been brought to you by the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, dedicated to enriching lives through the appreciation and knowledge of plants.

- And Mary, this garden was established about nine years ago.

It's obviously much more mature, you know, we saw the garden that we're just starting out.

So this is what you're gonna have in about a decade.

And you know this, all the plants are kind of, I would say they're fully mature.

We have a lot of different things from some of your forbs you have your toad foot, I mean, some asters, some akinesia and then we have some of these native grasses, big bluestem, things like that.

So this is what you're going to look like, after about a decade.

- Matt, do you help with the weeding for the homeowners like the second year or in the few, you know, after they've been put in?

- We don't do any maintenance afterwards?

If they need some extra help, or they have some questions, you know, we're there for them for sure.

But as far as like the maintenance, that way, we don't do the physical maintenance, because there's just so many of them.

I mean, we have almost 70 gardens, probably just within Morris.

So it'd be a full time job for one person.

But if they have questions, you know, some of these plants get rather big, you know, if they're wondering about splitting things, and kind of keeping them more contained, will help with that sort of thing.

But as far as weeding and maintenance, we don't do that.

- [Mary] So people can actually split the plants if they want to?

- [Matt] Yep, yep.

And this garden, I mean, I planted this thing nine years ago.

And you know, every spring after I did clean up, I would kind of take the bunches and I would split them out and you know, give some away and a controlled state like this, they really can spread versus out on a native prairie where everything is really close together.

And it kind of inhibits their growth, they kind of grow on their own little area this, the plants and gardens tend to spread out.

So if you wanna keep that a little more manicured looking, I would recommend doing some splitting.

- So it's kind of up to the homeowner whether they wanted to all grow in together or if they want to keep distance between the plants?

- Yep, yeah, for sure.

And as you can see, even if you do that, you know, you're not gonna have a lot of distance between plants.

I mean, they're all kind of in their section, but it's still kind of one big garden.

- When you put this in, it looks like you chose plants that would be nice at different times of the year.

- Yeah, correct.

I mean, you know, keep the blooming with this garden as it matured, you know, after the first couple years.

Towards late summer, it would just attract monarch butterflies.

We we'd have hundreds and hundreds of monarch butterflies here.

You know, and there's a lot of kids in this neighborhood and they'd come and have fun with their nets and catch butterflies and it was really, really kind of something cool because you look out the window and there's just butterflies swarming everywhere.

- [Mary] Matt, the water comes off of the roof and comes down the downspout and then what is that thing that goes into the rain garden?

- [Matt] Sure, so there's an, we call it an emitter.

And what we do with this garden, what I did is I took this downspout and there's a rock bed and it goes right into the middle.

There's actually an emitter in the middle of this one that's tiled all the way to the back of the house to the back downspout so this garden is catching both the front and the back run off off of this roof.

So we're getting almost 100% of the runoff from the house.

- [Mary] What is an emitter?

- [Matt] Emitter is just, it's a end that we put on the tile, that with water pressure pops up and the water comes out of that.

And into the center of the garden, it looks like a sprinkler head kind of like a sprinkler head in the yard pops up.

This does the same from the water pressure in the tile coming down the downspout.

- [Mary] And what's the reason for having that?

- [Matt] Just to keep any kind of critters or anything out of it.

So when there's no water flowing in, it's flat and flush.

So that way we don't get anything going up the tile and getting plugged in the downspout.

- [Mary] Matt, I see that there is also a rain garden across the street.

Tell us about that.

- [Matt] About the same time that I put this one in, I had some discussions with the city and we put in what we'd call a kind of a modified garden in that little park area.

The city came in and actually when they redid the curbs, they put in curb cuts, which are just depressions in the curb that allows water runoff from the street to get into the garden.

So it's just a small kind of little garden right on the edge of that, it'll catch some runoff, you know, we put some very, some some hardy stuff in there, some grasses that'll be deep rooted not as many forbs just because there's traffic from kids in the neighborhood and things like that.

So, you know, gets a little bit more off in the neighborhood.

And it looks good, you know, just rather than having grass.

- [Mary] So did you do mulching in that one too?

- [Matt] There's rocks actually at the bottom of that one, which isn't typical for your typical rain garden.

But we did that just because we knew there'd be some higher foot traffic in that garden.

From, you know, a lot of kids in the neighborhood and people who were doing picnics and different things there.

So it works out.

It's a different, modified version of a garden.

- Matt, if people have questions, or would like to look into getting a rain garden, where can they go for information?

- Well, you can look at our Facebook page for Stephens SWCD or you can come to our website.

That's www.stephensswcd.org.

Or you can give us a call at the office (320)589-4886 and you can ask for myself, Matt or John.

- [Mary] How about people from other Counties because we're in a big region?

- [Matt] Right, yep.

And there's other counties that do it surrounding us.

Any of your soil and water conservation districts in your home county should offer this type of program work and direct you to where you can go to get this done.

- [Mary] Thanks so much.

- [Matt] Thank you.

(lighthearted music) - [Narrator] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of Truck Country.

Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart, Farmers Mutual telephone company and Federated Telephone Cooperative, proud to be powering Acira, pioneers in bringing state of the art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret, Yankel Julene in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom Minnesota and by Friends of Prairie Yard and Garden, a community of supporters like you who engaged in the long term growth of this series.

To become a friend of Prairie Yard and Garden visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(enchanting music)