Have a Yard? Consider Adding a Rain Garden.

Here are some resources to get you started.

A residential rain garden in Puyallup, WashingtonTed S. Warren/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In the last decade or so, a growing number of cities have turned to rain gardens. These shallow, plant-filled ditches can help reduce flooding during storms, which are predicted to get heavier in many parts of the country as the climate changes. Often, rain gardens are part of multi-million-dollar urban development projects. But they can also be part of smaller installations, tucked into a cut in the sidewalk or an open space in your yard.

In addition to helping absorb water, rain gardens can filter dirty street runoff, reduce urban heat, and provide a habitat for pollinators like bees and birds. So if you have space for it, you might consider adding one to your home.

And, depending on where you live, you may not have to pay much, if anything, to install it. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends looking out for reimbursement programs through your local and state public works offices, which can also offer guidance on where to put your garden and what type of foliage to plant.

Here are some more resources to get you started:

The federal government

Check out the EPA’s website for general information about rain gardens, and regional-specific resources for Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont residents. The EPA also links to a community outreach guide if your rain garden ambitions extend beyond your own yard.

There’s an app for that

The University of Connecticut’s Rain Garden App offers a clunky but helpful guide to designing and maintaining a rain garden.

Get schooled

Many academic institutions offer detailed guidance on rain gardens, including Rutgers University, Cornell University, and UMass Amherst.

Local rebate programs

Through a quick internet search, I was able to find green infrastructure rebate programs in many of the United States’ 10 biggest cities:

  • New York, New York: The city offers stormwater retention upgrades for properties that are 50,000 sq feet or larger.
  • Los Angeles, California: Get rebates for adding native plants and rain-capturing strategies like “swales, rain tanks, or infiltration trenches” to your property.
  • Chicago, Illinois: Order free rain barrels!
  • Houston, Texas: “Sponge gardens” may qualify for funding and/or tax abatement.
  • Phoenix, Arizona: Phoenix doesn’t offer rebate programs, but seven nearby communities—Avondale, Chandler, Glendale, Mesa, Peoria, Scottsdale, and Tempe—do.
  • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Rain gardens, rain barrels, downspout planters, and permeable pavers may be eligible for funding.
  • San Antonio, Texas: Get rebates for replacing your grass lawn, updating your irrigation system, and more.
  • San Diego, California: There are many possible rebates in San Diego, including rain gardens, rain-friendly pavement, and turf replacement.
  • Dallas, Texas: As far as I can tell, Dallas doesn’t offer rebate programs for green infrastructure but does offer free irrigation system evaluations.
  • San Jose, California: The Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency’s website reads, “Replace your lawn with a beautiful, drought-tolerant landscape and receive a rebate of up to $4 per sq. ft. Add a Rain Garden to your project and earn an additional $300 rebate!”

Take an online course

The Rain Garden Network offers a 10-step course for building your own rain garden for $7.99. (I haven’t taken the course myself; I came across it via the American Society of Landscape Architects.)

Look for volunteering opportunities

Even if you don’t have a yard of your own, there may be volunteer opportunities nearby to help care for or install rain gardens in public areas. San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s Rain Guardians program, for instance, allows residents to adopt and care for rain gardens. Or Friends of the Urban Forest, an SF-based nonprofit, has installed thousands of sidewalk gardens across the city, often with the help of volunteers.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate