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the early garden
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this is our selected pond site. these pictures show the area in shade but the photos were taken around 6pm. during the day, this site gets (almost) full sun all day from about 10am to 6pm. we hope to create an excellent, blooming water garden of lilies, lotus, arrowhead and emergent plantings. we are also going to landscape the area around the pond with native tallgrass prairie plants, as we are working on landscaping elsewhere in the yard. as you may not be able to see in the pictures noted as "sump area", we get a lot of water in our yard in the spring courtesy a network of drainage tiles on our property and the nearby des plaines river. the drainage tiles send the water into our sump well under the house then the sump pumps it out of the basement and back into the yard. so then what we get is an unplanned, rogue swamp right where the kids like to play up by the house. YUCK !! especially in spring when it's cold and rainy. in trying to figure out how to deal with all of this water, we got the bright idea to build an intentional pond with a wetland area and use the sump water to keep it topped off. everything we have read states that using sump water is not a recommended practice but in our instance that is the entire purpose of the pond. no matter how bad it might get, it's going to be 100% better than a constantly wet and swampy back yard.
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