There’s a clap of thunder, and the skies open up. Whether it’s a fall rainstorm or a summer shower, you need to make sure that your yard is prepared for the rain that’s to follow. If you live in a place with large storms, you can get your garden ready for the rainy season.

Get Your Plants Prepared

Rain showers can damage delicate spring flowers. If you’d like to keep your foliage around, strategically place flowers or other more delicate plants under the eaves or beneath larger trees and shrubs. These larger plants will protect the small ones, making a natural umbrella.

Improve Your Soil

Does water pool in your garden? If so, you may have soil that’s heavy with clay, which doesn’t drain easily. Add sand to garden beds or use the fall and winter season to add a layer of leaves, sticks, and other mulch to the garden beds. This mulch will decompose over the winter season and add air pockets to your soil, where falling rain can move easily into the soil. You’ll still get puddles when it rains hard, but they’ll drain much more easily.

Send Your Water Into the Ground

How can you send your water into the ground to nourish your plants? Change the topography of your garden. Add swales, low trenches that allow the water to slow, pool, and sink into the garden. Place water-loving plants in areas where water naturally pools, and these plants will help use the abundance of water. If you need to move water from place to place, add French drains to move water away from a specific area in your garden.

Raise Your Beds

If you have a high water table and want to grow plants that don’t love to be wet, consider adding raised beds to your garden. These beds will sit high above the water table. Make sure that the soil you add to your beds is adequately sandy and full of organic material so that your raised beds will drain easily.

Install and Repair Your Gutters

Around your home, your gutter systems are the way that you manage water that falls on your structures. Make sure that they’re in good working order before the rainy season comes. Clean your drains and install gutter covers to ensure that leaves and other debris don’t clog your drains. Make sure that your gutters are tightly attached to your house so that they will easily move the water from place to place without clogging.

Add Rain Barrels

While you’re managing your water, take advantage of the pouring rain and your home drainage systems and put them together to store water in rain barrels. Whether you have an underground cistern or a small barrel by the side of your house, storing rainwater means that you’ll have more water to use in your garden, and it prevents this water from flooding your yard during the rainy season.

If you’d like to install gutters to better manage the water in your garden, contact Harry Helmet. Our gutter cover and gutter heating products help your gutters run clean and clear, no matter what the time of year. Contact Harry Helmet today and see how our gutter products can help you manage the water flow in your garden.

Written by Del Thebaud