I posted this in the Water Garden Forum and received an invite to pop over here. :) When did this get here?? LOL Anywho, this was my post:
I've been doing a lot of reading on bog gardens. Most of the time they are connected to or nearby a pond. I have my pond exactly where I want it and intend add 2 more tiers for a lily garden and a pebble/creek type garden with a fountain.
I have an area away from that where rain water collects heavily. There are actually more than area like that. I have already fixed one part to wear it drains away. I am planning to fix a second area but need to wait until I can get an escavator in here. The last area that sits wet is around an old well pump and I have decided to deliberately turn that into a bog. I have all sorts of plants that can handle sitting wet and also freezing so I am in the process of digging out the weeds and little grass that is there and I am going to back fill it with peat then plant it.
I am wondering if anyone else has done this on a large scale. Do you have pics? I am in zone 6 and would love to hear your plant choices both perennial and not. My area is in full sun.
Building a bog. Have any advice?
I belive Equil on this forum has a bog that she can give you some tips from. She is also in zone 5. I am sure she will reply when able to. Although be warned she is long winded :-)
ROTFLOL Now, how do you think I got here??
Too funny..
I have a few bogs but... they're blanketed right now. Oh the pain of seeing my babies under the cover of snow.
Moot point though because philcula's bogs blow my bogs out of the water so maybe he'll come on in and comment.
Other than that, rain gardening is picking up steam across the nation. I think we'll be seeing more and more rain gardens in the years to come. Actually rather exciting. When I have time a little later on, I'll go poke around and see if I can find any good links to rain/gutter gardens. There are some pretty impressive set ups out there.
Hey Wolf, I have low self esteem. Don't listen to anything Pixie says.
And Chelle.... welcome to the addiction. My only regrets are that at this time of year I can't send you anything to get you going. Unless of course you want to go and add a jack hammer to your ever growing tool collection.
OMG! Don't even get me started! I don't like the patio at my new house. It is not slanted just right and is cracked and water sits on one little spot. I can barely tell you how excited I have been at the prospect of knocking my teeth out with a real jack hammer! LOL
I have to drain off one area near the soon to be bog and have been thinking basketball court, like 1/2 court kind of thing. The visions of escavators, drain tile, dump trucks, cement trucks, droooooool! We all have our hang ups! ;)
The good side of the cold is that I will have time to research my impending doom. giggle
Hey, maybe you guys can tell me about some of your favorite plants and ease of growing them and whether or not they are hardy or hard to store? That would aim me in the right direction for research and you can brag about your plants. :)
This is where I am putting my bog garden. You can see where the drainage problem is and how the water settles. The top froze and the snow stuck to it. You can break it with a shovel and there is water beneath the ice. It fills up with every rain. I started digging a small area and the water ran right into it. I want to incorporate the well pump into the garden.
You can see my two long beds were well thought out and end in the perfect position. LOL I plan to put in more beds left and right of those.
The bog garden will go from the snow covered spot over to the pump. I am picturing the bog at about 20 feet long, left to right and at least 10 feet wide. The sun comes up to the right of this area and goes down to the left so it will be in full sun most of the day. If my reading was correct, I want the smallest plants on the South side and the tallest ones to the North side which will work out perfect! The largest plants will be able to be seen from the road so the smaller plants will be on the back side and sort of like a secret garden.
Any comments?
The area above slopes just slightly to the area in this picture. There is a hump between them right next to this grape arbor. I want to get rid of the area in this pic. I am planning to drain it off to a small lake that I will be digging as soon as I get around to buying drain tile and renting an escavator again. The water sits very deep here. There was also a bad spot to the left of the garage and on the far side but I fixed the drainage there.
I'll have to find and post the pics of the rain water. Sigh. We just bought this property in September so we are just now discovering the quirks and will have to figure out how best to work with them. For anyone that missed it, I packed up my 1/4 acre yard stuffed with plants and have been busy moving them to my new 7 1/4 acre yard. LOL My goal is to open a commercial nursery in by 2007. I'm hoping to have things moving sooner than that but if I just sell plants curbside next year or even down in town that'll be fine with me. It will give me time to set up a website and also time to get a feel for the local people and what they like. :)
"The good side of the cold is that I will have time to research my impending doom." Well now, that was certainly easy enough getting this convert now wasn't it! She rolled right over without a fight.
Just out of curiosity, are your girls basketball players? Is that why you want a half court? At the top of our driveway we have one of those huge weighted basketball hoops for our boys. If we need to move it out of the way in the winter to plow, my husband and I just unanchor it and roll it off. It's big with some sort of a plexiglass back splash for lack of a better word. Would one of those work for your girls? It would be a lot cheaper and you wouldn't have to pour concrete. Not that you probably wouldn't get in to pouring concrete but as you know... excavating is expensive and then you'd have the cost of pouring the half court pad with frost footings and you'd probably need some rebar in there and oh my $$$!
Now about this spring, plan well and we'll get you fixed up with some Sarracenia. Sarracenia seem so you!
My favorites are probably the naturally occurring hybrids. Here's a link to one-
http://davesgarden.com/pf/go/103010/index.html
The listing was input incorrectly but the correct name for this plant is actually Sarracenia x excellens.
There are other naturally occurring hybrids out there that I like too. After that, I like Sarracenia rubra but this changes from year to year. I have a particular fondness for Sarracenia in general but I do lust for Pinguicula (both Mexican and North American temperate species) and then I do have a thing for Dionaea and temperate Drosera and and and... do you see where this is going?
Here you can see just how bad the water sits after a torrential down pour. The area you can see flooded furthest away, I have fixed. It now drains back to the field to the far right. I just dug a trench for now but will have to properly dig it out and put in drain tile.
The area closest is just right of the pic above. The well pump is just off to the left of the pic. This is the area I want to keep wet.
Do you think crawdads will cause a problem for the bog plants?
Oops, missed your post with photos. Say what ever happened to the chicken coop? Did you break down and paint it pink with purple polka dots or did you opt for the camoflauge look or heavens to betsy... you didn't tear it down did you?
The area you selected has good sun. The one thing that concerns me is that you may have to build it up a little bit. Although some Sarrs seem to like to have wet feet while they are actively growing, I don't think frozen in ice is a good thing. They aren't a marginal plant like a cattail and they aren't an aquatic. Other than that, the location you chose is excellent.
Regarding the local people and what they will like, anything pretty that won't croak on them would be my guess. There is a growing trend toward native plants these days. Often overlooked, these species are bombproof for the most part once established. I suspect hostas would be a big hit too. People like those plants and there aren't too many other species that people can identify with that can take shade.
Wow, just caught your next post with the photo. That doesn't look like a problem area to me... that looks like a major opportunity. Holy moly great balls of fire!
Whoops! You sneaked on in on me. LOL
The Docs think my six girls will easily reach heights of 5'8" - 5'11" and maybe more! We all already enjoy volleyball and badminton and keep a net up for both. I don't intend to garden that area as it is 99% clay and holds a lot of water during and after rains (picture below) and did I mention crawdads come up out of the ground? LOL No plans are set in stone so to speak, but I mentioned putting a court there and the kids thought it would be a neat idea. We moved "out to the country" so being able to keep them busy, active and occupied will be important. I plan to put drainage here but can't really just build it up because that could force the rain water into the garage which in my opinion should have been built up higher!
If I rent an escavator and dig the hole myself, I can have a truckload of gravel delivered then a truckload of cement. Neither of those is horribly expensive. One good thing about having this much land and a gravel drive, is ease of access! That is something I never had at my old house. Zoning laws out here are pretty lax.
I had occasion to meet the son of the original owner, that built the house. He told me this flooded out area was their veggie garden. I can see no sign that the soil was ever improved and I wonder if the good soil washed away?
You stop that! LOL Wow you are fast! LOL
This area takes weeks to drain. The topsoil is only 8" deep at best anywhere on this part of the land. My plan is to dig out the area I want to remain moist and back fill it with peat/sand or whatever you guys think would be best. When I put in drainage for that other area, I will probably connect that to this as well. I am thinking the water might sit a few inches deep in the bottom but anything over that would drain through the next area and to my 'lake'. I am using what I dig out to fill in the areas I don't want to use for the bog. This should drop the water table there and the plants would actually grow a bit above the water in a peaty area. Am I on the right track?
Oh, the $64,ooo chicken coop still stands. I still plan to take off the old covering or in the least sand it down and see what is beneath the peeling paint. From inside, some looks sound and some does not. I do not figure it would cost much to recover it. It is out of the way and sort of sits on a bit of an island. The area I said I had drained, runs through a ditch just to the right of the chicken coop. I think I can fence off that area to keep the birds safe then build a pig area behind that where they can enjoy the little ditch. I think the pigs would like that rain water in the spring and summer.
Well dear, I've been living vicariously through your photos. I did a little research for you. I hate to say this but you've got it all over there babe! You can have bogs, and fens, and rain gardens, and even a small marsh. I actually have a few bogs here, some fens, a tremendous marsh, and a little rain garden. You have no idea how much potential you have there and if you are really going for growing commercially, you have a natural market right in those low lying areas. Do you realize what you have there? You have land that can accommodate species people only dream of growing. So many different plants dependent upon what you will create. I am absolutely thrilled for you.
Here's a start on your winter reading-
Regarding rain gardens, they really are nothing more than bioretention systems. Just another form of storm water management.
http://unisci.com/stories/20022/0425026.htm
start here-
http://www.raingardens.org/Index.php
Poke around at that site for a bit by clicking on the links.
Now check these sites out, some of the information will be redundant-
http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/design/2004sp_raingardens1.html
http://www.duluthstreams.org/citizen/wet_garden.html
http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/water/wm/nps/rg/
http://www.weemscreek.org/proj-mine-raingarden.html#plants
http://clean-water.uwex.edu/pubs/raingarden/gardens.pdf#search='rain%20gardens'
http://www.ci.des-moines.ia.us/departments/PR/rain_gardens.htm
http://www.prairienursery.com/catalog/cat_raingarden.asp
a manual here-
http://clean-water.uwex.edu/pubs/raingarden/rgmanual.pdf
Another possibility with as much water as you have pooling there might be a retention marsh-
http://www.nwf.org/backyardwildlifehabitat/marsh.cfm
I bought this publication when I bought my copy of Lakescaping For Wildlife and Water Quality and now I see it is available on line for now charge-
http://www.pca.state.mn.us/publications/manuals/stormwaterplants.html
Here’s a link for Lakescaping For Wildlife and Water Quality
http://www.barr.com/PDFs/ShellsQEs/ecol_land.pdf
Just a little blurb on rain barrels-
http://www.emmitsburg.net/gardens/articles/frederick/2003/rain_barrells.htm
Don't buy any publications. When you start getting into wetlands anything, the price is high. Wetlands is my thing... lord knows I am surrounded. If there is a publication out there that you are interested in and if you can't get it at the library, e-mail me and I'll send it to you to borrow.
This spring I will go out into my wetlands and take photos for you. I'll also go down to the Wetlands Demonstration Project and take photos for you. You will be sitting there looking at these photos and I won't be the only one around here accused of drooling into keyboards any more. Misery loves company.
OMG! You are a wealth of information! I will definately set up a folder and bookmark all these and start a whole new kind of gardening for me! When I first saw all that water sitting, and the locals told me 'the land sits wet' and the original owner made a delivery here and congratulated me on purchasing a 'swamp', I was ready to sit down and cry. I thought my "Dream" flooded away. I decided my landscaping course could be put to good use and that I was bound and determined to make this work. I quickly tucked away my fear and dread and decided I would make this my dream! Thanks for your help!
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
All I can say is that I know that sinking stick your head in your hands and cry for having purchased swamp land feeling well. Wetlands can be very intimidating and the Army Corps of Engineers doesn't make the process any less daunting.
Here's what I have learned, there are a lot of people out there with wetlands on their properties. And... there are a lot of people out there tring to create wetlands on their properties. You really can't plant anything in them other than native plants. The market is there but the "flat land" "high and dry" nurseries out there are not able to produce the goods. You may unknowingly have just literally fallen into a niche that I believe is going to grow into something in the years to come that will be a force with which to contend. As you can see by the links above, there is interest in rain gardens and such or the www wouldn't be littered with all of the "how to" sites. The demand for wtlands plant material is out there, that's a given.
Pssst, you do realize there is a tremendous demand for terrestrial orchids... right? I'm not too great with those but I'm sure somebody is into them who can help you. Can we say fen?
I just had such a good read! I hit everyone of those links. I ventured to google and found some more and also printed out some plant lists. I am sad to say I ripped out many of the 'native' Ohio plants and tossed them when they spread too much. Whoops!!
I've had a few whoops like that. No biggie, there's a seed bank.
One comment though, native plants don't generally spread too much. You might want to start taking photos and get positive IDs before you rip anything else out of the ground. This is advice I needed to take myself about 10 years ago.
Say Chelle, you're doing great! You're headed down the right path.
I suppose by now that what I am going to type is already known to you but... you are aware that Venus Fly Traps and Sarracenia grow no other place on this earth but right here on the continent of North America... right? We're talking as American as baseball and apple pie! Oh I love to be able to say that!
Regarding the plant lists you printed out, find the Latin name to each plant and type that into a search engine along with the word invasive. See what pops up. Not all plant lists are created equal. If one of those plants you decide to start growing is aggressive, it will grow like gang busters on your property and your neighbors will not be too happy with you if it ends up on their property and you won't be all that thrilled if it ends up choking out other plantings. The other search you can do is the name of the plant and the words native range. I'm not a purist so anything east of the rockies is fine with me. If you need any help with plants native to the eastern US, count me in. I had another thought, you mentioned you had wooded swampy shade areas. Have you checked in to blueberries?