Rain garden

The 'back story'
A few years ago, I attended a Boroondara Council sustainability forum. I rode my bike there and got a little lost on the back roads through the suburbs (I try to avoid cycling on main roads. I arrived about last as the event was starting. I was offered a ticket for the door prize and I almost refused as I was in a hurry to sit down and said I never win at these things anyway.

The forum ended and panel member Alan Pears (hero and local legend in sustainability/energy) stood and drew a ticket for the top prize, a $1,500 raingarden sponsored by Melbourne Water. My spine tingled and I somehow 'knew' my name was about to be called out. And it was - I won!

Later
We were about to have our garden renovated to be drought tolerant and add some extra paving laid for the children to play on (I now question that decision to get more hard surfaces put down - we live and learn). We asked the raingarden installers to come along and start work. We talked with them about budget and design and my requirements were more than the budget - so we settled on me doing some of the digging as prep work. They did a great job and it was finished in a couple of days.

Later still
I received calls from Melbourne Water to ask if they could come and take pictures of a couple of (family) models and the rain garden for their 10,000 Raingardens promotion. I said yes, but missed the photoshoot because I was out at work.

Then they called again and asked if they could feature the garden on 'Garden Gurus'. I said yes and again missed it because I was again (unusually) working away from the house that day. Melbourne Water's GM was there and the shoot went on all day. Apparently they were disturbed by my rainwater pump kicking in as the toilet was flushed in the house!

Even later
Reading my email today - I saw the Council offering free workshops for raingarden building - guess whose raingarden was featured (in it's early days) . . .

Modifications
The raingarden area now looks quite different. As indicated above, I questioned the sanity of creating more hard landscape in the garden and was desperate for a veggie patch. So I installed a 2 x 2 metre (veggie friendly) sleeper box, bolted to the fromt of the rain garden (which forms one of the sides of the box) and filled it with prime soil. It can be seen in the background of the picture here.

It's not as 'pretty' as I would once have hoped - but then I'm subscribing more to the ideas of Permaculture - that we need to make things simply functional and useful and worry less about appearance. One reason I started to pull out some decorative plants in the prime sunny spot of our other garden area and plant veggies there too.

This water purifying device is probably the lowest mainenance feature of the garden.