Don’t work the soil when it’s wet. Especially when it’s pouring outside.

In the evening after I’d gotten the first layer of leaves mixed into the site, it began to rain. It poured all night long and through the morning. I thought optimistically that these circumstances would offer the perfect opportunity to test out the rain garden‘s filtering performance.

Here’s the site about an hour after the rain cleared up. The kids came home from school and shouted, “Mom! Cool! You installed a pond!”

I admit to feeling somewhere between petrified and panicked when I saw the soup I’d concocted. Rationality soon returned to me. This is in fact what the rain garden is supposed to do. When one digs a large hole in clay soil, one obtains a pond. It’s the rate at which the soil drains that is critical.

Will it drain properly? Or will I be left with a festering pool of muck? What a riveting reality show my life would make.