We have been looking at this problem for quite awhile. The rain barrel fills up almost immediately in a storm, and then over flow, plus the rain from the sidewalk and the neighboring yards all flows down into our yard and floods the new blueberry plants.

So we stood in the rain one day and watched where the water flowed.

This space is not used for anything else, and seems to have clay only a few inches down, it looked like a good place to have a river bed.

We marked the river, and placed the logs of our “fallen tree”. We wanted it to look and be natural.

We awoke the worms…

“We have worm sign the likes of which even God has never seen.”

We dug out a couple of inches to sit the logs into the ground and filled in around them to create our river bank.

After a couple of test runs and adding some rocks, we have the problem solved and the beginning of a beautiful area of the yard. We will be adding more river rock and plants. Keeping this area as a natural area, we hope to attract predators for the garden pests that will show up in Spring when we plant our vegetable and flower gardens.

The ideas we used for creating this area are based on what we have been reading and watching about Permaculture.

The test! Rained like crazy for many hours today…
And we have water directed where we wanted it to go!

Success 🙂