Thursday, September 23, 2010

Build Your Rain Garden - Part II


A pretty rain garden will raise the pleasure that people feel in their households. The family room with a big screen tv might be a wonderful room, but a rain garden design in the yard will be a very unique place. A yard made with a rain garden will provide a great position for meeting with friends and family. A rain garden in the backyard will be full of life and full of color. In the backyard of this garden will be a place that people want to be for different activities. This type of garden is a specialty of dedicated gardeners. Dedicated rain garden gardeners do not go to the nurseries and choose the latest sale item to throw into the backyard. These gardeners think long and hard about a design for their gardens. They are very familiar with the most popular designs, and they decide which of these designs will be best for the space they garden. They know the rain garden has special characteristics. Numerous of these dedicated gardeners choose the rain garden design for the special qualities involved.

Basic idea of a rain garden began sometime in the 1990s in the state of Maryland. They are now one of the fastest growing areas of concern for home landscapes. A rain garden is structured to make the best use of natural resources especially water. The purpose of a rain garden is to provide places for rain to soak into the ground, and not flow directly into storm drains, by creating a rain garden. A rain garden should be good news for those paying the water bill. This bill should be substantially reduced by those with a rain garden for their landscapes. This type of garden is carefully planned and constructed to capture as much water as possible for use to nourish the plants in the garden. The right constructed rain garden design should capture water that has run off the roof or gutter of a house. Usually located under a downspout, a rain garden can simply be an area that slopes away from your house that is planted with vegetation adapted to large (but intermittent) amounts of rainfall. A properly planned rain garden design should also help to pass some of the waste that runs off the soil into fresh water sources. The plants and the soil in this type of garden are carefully planted to keep waste and pollutants from causing the damage that they often do in other gardens. Native plants are ideally suited to these conditions. A rain garden should not be located too close to buildings because this could damage these structures. These gardens must be carefully placed to capture the water. A rain garden should be placed where the plants will get plenty of sunshine. The sunshine is necessary for the growth of the plants in a rain garden. For a more elaborate rain garden, place 1" x 6" boards on their sides to form a box, nail or bolt them together, backfill with a topsoil and sand mixture, then plant. A beautiful rain garden design will add so much beauty to a home, and those people who would like to establish a garden should look carefully at using this design.

Consideration About Rain Garden


Our natural environment provides a natural groundwater filtering process. Rainwater flows into low places, where native wildflowers and grasses soak up some of the water. The remainder slowly soaks into the ground over 24-48 hours. In a natural environment such as this, streams and creeks are fed by cool groundwater, which supplies the streams at a steady rate. Rain gardens help to replace what we have taken away by building and paving. It slows runoff waste, increases infiltration, decrease surface run-off from roofs, paved areas, and road, and reduces the risk of flooding. Not all subsurface water will soak into the ground water. Surface run off water that is not absorbed in the rain garden slows down significantly from the swale and vegetative barrier which reduces sedimentation and pollution further downstream. Because the water moves slower in the ground than it does over paving, rain gardens can ease peak flow more than just reducing the volume of water reaching the outlet.
It will be best to plant a rain garden in a depression that is projected to take all, or as much excess rainwater run-off from a house or other building and its associated landscape as possible. The plants should be a selection of native wetland edge vegetation, such as sedges, rushes, ferns, shrubs and trees and absorb the excess water, and through the process of transpiration put water vapor back into the air. A more wide-ranging definition covers all the possible components that can be used to capture, channel, divert, and make the most of the natural rain and snow that falls on a property. In developed areas, low areas are filled in and the ground is leveled or paved, and water is taken into storm drains. This causes many problems. First of all, the streams that are fed by storm drains are subjected to sudden surges of water each time it rains, which contributes to erosion and flooding. Also, the water is warmer than the groundwater that normally feeds a stream, which upsets the delicate system. Warmer water cannot hold as much dissolved oxygen. Many fish and other creatures in the streams are unable to live in an environment with fluctuating temperatures.

Probably best place for a Rain gardens location is near a drainpipe from a building’s roof (with or without rain barrels), although if there’s a basement, a French drain may be used to direct the rainwater to a location farther from the building. Normally, a rain garden—or a series of rain gardens—is the endpoint of a drainage, but sometimes it can be designed as a pass-through system where water will percolate through a series of gravel layers and be captured by a French drain under the gravel and carried to a storm water system. This type of gardens are beneficial for many reasons. They can lessen the effects of drought, help filter some pollutants from run off, make paved areas more attractive, and provide interesting setting opportunities. They also encourage wildlife and biodiversity, tie together buildings and their surrounding environments in attractive and environmentally advantageous ways, and make a significant contribution to important environmental problems that affect us all. This garden type provides an ideal way to use and optimize any rain that falls, reducing or avoiding the need for additional water usage or irrigation. They allow a household or building to deal with excessive rainwater runoff without burdening the public storm water networks. Rain gardens differ from retention basins, in that the water will infiltrate the ground within a day or two. This creates the advantage that the rain garden does not allow mosquitoes to breed.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Why Organic Food? - Basic Notes.


This type of food is grown in a manner that is friendly for the environment as well as safe to eat. The goal is to go with nature rather of against it to get the provide of food that is needed out there. Many individuals are afraid about the bad effects of conventional farming methods. There are some common problems when growing fruits and vegetables. There are pests that want to eat them as well. Conventional methods allow the use of pesticides to control them as well as herbicides to get rid of weeds. With organic foods though no chemicals are used. Natural compost is used as fertilizer and traps are used to get rid of the pests. Weeds are pulled by hand or removed with machines as well.

With organic food processing though the ground is able to maintain a great deal of the nutrients. In fact, in many areas the compost that is used for fertilizer can actually help the land to be well than it was in the past. This means that the ground isn’t being depleted of anything and that future crops have an excellent opportunity of growing in that location. In order to assist the soil they also rotate the fields where they grow the crops. For case they may have a few of them open right now so that following year they can grow crops in them and open up a few others. This break in production helps the land to have the opportunity to recover and to thrive. Organic food also refers to the raising of animals in a manner where the food from them is better. For example the meat we get from pigs and cows as well as the eggs we get from chickens. These animals are raised without being given medications, hormones, or other elements that aren’t healthy for them or for humans to get when they eat these sources of food. These animals are also fed organic foods to further enhance the purity of what they have to offer. In order for productions on the marketplace to be certified as organic they have to meet some strict guidelines. The land must be free from all use of chemicals for at least the past three years. Annual inspections have to be conducted on that land as well as land testing to confirm this. Records of all their activities and what methods they use have to be qualified. Those written documents can be asked for and reviewed at any time by the USDA.

Positive method actings must also be applied and followed in order to productive control pests and to improve the overall quality of the ground. Meeting all of these guidelines is time consuming as well as challenging. Yet there are numerous farmers out there ready to complete the process in order to offer food that is chemical substance free. They also are able to make a profit on the food sources that they provide in such a way. You will find different sources of organic food out there at supermarkets these days. More grocery stores are giving consumers the choice of these chemical free products. While they do cost more it is due to the fact that they cost much more to process. You can also get them from farm markets out there where they proudly sell what they have grown on their own land locally. More farmers are considering the fact that organic food really is a great way to offer great food supplies and to protect the environment. The process has really taken on in states all over the world.