I purchase my first home in August of 2022 from the 2nd owners who have been their since the early 70s. They took immaculate care of the home itself but the yard and extra space behind the sheds and garage were extremely bare and heavily compacted soils. I wanted to use native plants from Michigan and Wayne County to help attract pollinators, butterflies, and birds. I know from historical images there is a buried creek that used to run through my subdivision fewer than a hundred yards from my home, so I knew that water was likely to pool or just runoff into the street and make it's way to the Rouge River one way or another. I used Mariette Nowak's book Birdscaping in the Midwest was a perfect resource to meet all of my needs.

My day job involves making maps, so I used that ability to create a digital map of my garden area and to depict the area of impermeable surface on my property. Out of my almost 7,000 sqft of property about 4,300 sqft was impermeable. Using the calculations based on a sub-24 hour percolation test I would need about 650 sqft of rain garden space. For my interest of trying to attract as many pollinators and birds as possible I did my best to increase that garden space to close to 900 sqft.

The highlighted green area represents all of the area that I could plant some types of plant life. Using the 5 foot buffer from my house and garage, both of which are on a slab I feel I can safely plant short root natives closer to the front of my house in some partly shaded beds.

I use two 55 gallon rain barrels that connect to downspouts that collect almost all of the roof run off on the south side of the house, I then use that hand water all of my front of house plants. I am in the middle of connecting and burying pipes from north facing downspouts to those parts of my garden and all of the back yard plantings. I do the same with the downspouts on my garage to try and minimize any of the water that would go from my roofs to the driveway.

Using Birdscaping in the Midwest I picked about 30 unique species of flowers and sedges, and currently two different dogwoods. I have 6 different goldenrods, 4 species of milkweed, cardinal flower and blue lobelia, compass plant, mountain mint, two coneflowers, ironweed, 3 species of asters, creeping juniper, and a few more that I cannot recall. I got my plants from Feral Flora, Wildtype, the Friends of the Rouge, and 2 ounces of rain garden seed mix from Michigan Wildflower Farm. Below are some of my snapshots for the first year of the rain garden showing some of the blooms of the cardinal flower, blue lobelia, Culver's Root, and black-eyed Susans.

Below is the updated plan with my current plantings and the paths that I am going to create for the water to run off my home and my garage. The green portions are spaces where I have not started planting with natives yet but have plans to, and the blue is where I have my current plantings that I intend to maintain. I currently use rain barrels to collect the runoff during the rain event, and then I manually water the garden spaces with that water after the plants, and ground, have become open to absorbing the water again. I have run some water flow analysis on my site and this part of the neighbor hood to see if any of my neighbors runoff would flow through my property and be susceptible to being captured by my plantings. Along my north fence the neighbors backyards do flow into my plantings so I count a portion of their runoffs in helping me to offset my driveway run off. My driveway currently drains away from my house to the south with no good way for me to currently capture that water.

I am prepping my sites for year two, I am currently winter sowing about 6 ounces of seeds I collected from the first year's flowering plants. I plan on supplementing my plantings with plugs from Feral Flora, Friends of the Rouge, and Wildtypes to add to my number of plant species and genera. My goal is to get a full pound of seeds from the 2024 gardens and to then start winter sowing them to plant around my city's parks and other public spaces.