My neighborhood's rain garden flooded after that big storm last month

Last month we got hammered with rain here in Austin, about 5 inches in one afternoon. I built a small rain garden in my front yard two years ago to catch runoff from the roof, and it always handled storms fine. But that day the water backed up and spilled over the curb onto the sidewalk, leaving mud everywhere. I dug down and found the gravel layer had clogged with silt and leaves from the neighbor's oak tree. It took me a whole Saturday to clean it out and add a wider overflow channel. Since then I've been wondering if I should switch to a different filter fabric or just accept that maintenance is part of the deal. Has anyone else had their rain garden fail during an extreme weather event and found a fix that actually lasted? I'm curious if there's a better design for the bigger downpours we keep seeing.

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stella_lane25d ago

Oh man, same thing happened to me last spring, our little ditch filled up so fast it looked like a kiddie pool and just dumped everything onto the sidewalk. I ended up just adding a bigger overflow pipe and now I check the grate once a month, seems to hold up okay so far but I know another big one is coming.