In the last week, many people in the southern United States have had to deal with huge amounts of rainfall. And while flood waters aren’t usually something you can plan for when you’re doing the landscaping of your home, if you live in an area where you can get a lot of rain, it’s wise to think about this when designing the landscaping around your commercial property or home so as to limit the damage you sustain.
To help you in doing this, here are three tips for bracing your landscaping for heavy rains.
Use More Native Plants
When you’re getting ready to plan out what plants you’ll use in your landscaping, one of the best things you can do to help your property hold strong when there are heavy rains is to plant more native plants.
Plants that are native to your area are going to be used to the type of climate that is there. And while things can change from year to year, if you’re in an area that’s prone to heavy rains, the plants that have thrived in this area for years and years will know how to survive this. These types of plants will better be able to filter water into the ground rather than keeping it on top to flood and saturate everything around it. So when choosing what to plan, go for more native plants.
Create A Drainage Plan
Something else that you’ll want to think about when you’re designing the layout of your landscaping, both at the beginning and when you know that a storm is on its way, is how water will drain around your property.
Ideally, you should try to funnel any water that gets on your property away from your home. This means that if you have changes in elevation around your landscaping, be sure that you have ways to divert water from higher areas to lower areas without having too much water pooling around the buildings.
Give The Rain A Place To Safely Collect
For people who live in areas where lots of rain is common, you can put design elements into your landscaping that can collect rainwater in a safe way without affecting the other parts of your landscaping too much. This can be done by implementing things like rain gardens in your landscaping.
With a rain garden, you can divert water into this feature that’s meant to have water in it. As long as the water levels aren’t too high that adding more water would overflow it, having a rain garden to collect heavy rains could be a great idea.
If you get a lot of rain or know of a big rainstorm headed your way and you want to ensure that your landscaping can handle it, consider using the tips mentioned above to set your landscaping up correctly.
