Welcome to the Sustainable Rain Water Management Course for Gardens and Homeowners

In the UK, managing rain and storm-water is becoming a big problem and unless you’ve been directly affected by some of the symptoms – primarily local flooding and pollution, it’s possible that you haven't necessarily considered any connection between what goes on in your own garden and these events.

Urban development, the loss of plants, trees and green spaces, old water management infrastructure, and the effects of climate change are all contributing to more extreme and frequent flooding.
Yet, often in the same year, we’re getting water shortages and our current water management systems are struggling to keep up.
However, as homeowners and gardeners, we can all make a positive difference in our own spaces that can help rebalance what is going on as a whole.

Over the next few sessions, we’ll look at how you can manage rainwater in a way that benefits both your own space and the environment: simple steps to reduce the pressure on our overworked drainage systems and how these changes can also improve your garden space for you and local wildlife and possibly also save you money.

We’ll start briefly with some ways to catch and store rainwater: Water butts and dipping tanks are great for collecting water from your roof which can be used for watering your plants or other outdoor tasks. We’ll then take a more in depth look at Rain Planters. These are a fantastic way to collect and manage rainwater in your garden. They help reduce flooding, improve biodiversity, and add beauty to your outdoor space.
While their ‘in ground’ (let’s call them, grown up!) version - rain gardens are outside the scope of this course due to some of the more involved assessments required to get these right, these are also a beautiful, natural way to manage rain water with the benefits rain planters provide as well as, importantly, allowing rain water to replenish ground water reserves.

But it’s not just about capturing rain water to use, there are other ways effective rain water management can be designed into your space. For example, permeable paving allows rainwater to soak into the ground which reduces run-off and helps replenish these important underground water reserves.

By increasing your awareness of the issues we're facing and making some small changes, your garden can become more resilient to some of the more extreme weather we are starting to experience as well as helping reduce pressure on local drainage systems, reduce flooding, and create a more sustainable environment for everyone.

This course is not designed to replace professional design advice you might want or need to effect major changes in your space.
However, it is realistic to say that not everyone is going to use a garden designer. So, my aim is to provide insight to some of the issues we face as gardeners and homeowners.
Furnished with this understanding we can then look at some practical ideas that are easy to put into practice, no matter the size of the garden, and that will start to make a difference.

Let’s get started!