Ok, so this is a example of a small rain garden for a house in the city or town.. Mine is a massive rain or storm garden to be.. It will collect the water off my roof, as well as collect the overflow from the one side of the driveway to the other side. This system is created to catch storm waters and recharge your ground water.
Given our big hard storms, in the past few years we seem to have a pattern of no rain.. HARD large volume’s of rain. Collecting that rain for storage is important but so it creating a system that helps keep that water on the property so that it can recharge our shallow house well.
We called in help on this one, It was not a do it by hand project, we had cleared the tree’s but the machine cleared the roots, and did the first digging.. The bottom is nicely created flat and we have already started adding in many loads of compost from our farm to the pit and it will be mixed with the native soil into the first layer
We will continue to clean our barn and use the fall prep to have the barn ready for winter use into this project, mixing the compost and the native soil till we get the level we want.. then we will have the gravel hauled in and hire the same person to come back and move the rest of the soil in at levels and to build the permaculture berms around the rain garden itself.. I also have a area that we need to have him pull another large amount of roots up.. he can do it in a hour that would take us much longer.
Then it comes back to us and we will need to start planting it.. Its a longer term project and of course we have to create the dry creak bed that will lead the water to the rain garden itself from the house.
Just another Day on the Farm 
Do you know what you plan to grow there? Anything special or are you simply diverting rain water and taking advantage of that? I’m always trying to come up with different ideas that might work better than the raised beds I have. I love my raised beds – but they’re not practical for some things.
Hi ValB So I am making a version of rain garden/storm garden. So there is level one, two, three and berms. Level one is plants that can stand having their feet in water for up X amount of time or days and at the same time can handle dry/drought.. They have a list of plants.. I am personally going with a mix of bee plants and elderberry, level two is higher, I am going with plants that can handly less water on roots but still some.. That one I will be putting into rose bushes that like being by water, post coming on those, the seed was collected in Nova Scotia. The third level is the highest and its going to be a native bee flowering swamp edge plant as I need to keep it smaller so that I can access the roses for hip harvest.. then the berms are going into permaculture style.. the bushes will be high bush cranberry as the biggest, the next are going to be blueberry bushes, then the next layer will have a few rhubarbs and then the rest will be annuals that switch up.
Oh that sounds awesome 🙂 You must be on some decent soil. We are on heavy wet clay – many years ago when we moved here we dug an outhouse. A week later water seeped in and filled it – so that was the end of that. I had been hoping to dig a nice root cellar at the time as well – but the outhouse experiment put an end to that idea. Still, we’re always looking for ways to divert water, especially in the spring – being able to combine that with a garden of sorts – worth thinking about. 😊
I will admit that most folks just want flowers and rocks in there but I can’t give up that much of the yard or a area that should get water holding and then slowly filtering in the ground and not put it to food or herbal production in some way 🙂
Keeping a close eye on this project: )
Or clay-sand, perhaps?
Clay Sand.. yes..
Clay Sand.. yes.. This area was covered in tree’s for a number of years and lawn before that, so its never been given any of my extra’s.. but its had years of the what the tree’s give to the soil
It’s easy to see where your topsoil ends, but is that a clay layer on the bottom here, Val?
ya, its clayish.. still that is 3.5 feet down, so I can’t say I am surprised to hit clay at that point 🙂