How YOU Can Save the Puget Sound

How you personally can save Puget Sound may sound like an impossible, daunting task. However, it is relatively easy. All you need to do is to keep the rain water that falls on your house, driveway and lawn on your property, rather than have it flow onto our roads and into streams, ditches and storm drains.  It all ends up in the lake which then flows in the Sound.  If we each deal with our own rainfall in this manner, much pollution will be eliminated from our streams, the lake and Puget Sound.  In addition, there would be more water available in the ground, in the summer, for our trees and shrubs.

When the island was all forested, most water percolated into the ground.  Less than 1% flowed into our streams as surface water runoff.  When water runs off of driveways and roads it picks up pollutants from our cars.  When it runs off of lawns it pick up pet waste, herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers.  These last three are easy to eliminate, pick up after your pet and don't use chemical fertilizers and only use herbicides and pesticides as a last resort, after all else has failed. Remember more than 90% of all bugs are good bugs.  Think of bugs as food for birds and bats.   A healthy landscape should be full of insects, with the good bugs keeping the destructive pests in balance.

One way of keeping the water from your downspouts on your property is to redirect the water to rain gardens and bioswales. Rain gardens are vegetated flat depression to provide areas of infiltration where bioswales are sloped to slow and move water from one point to another.  Both are intended to increase percolation of rain water into the ground.  Care needs to be taken in rain garden placement, especially if you live on a steep slope.  Consider using mostly native plants so not only will you be managing your surface water, but you will be providing habitat and food for our birds and butterflies.  Replace lawn with native plants.

Once you have your rain water under control, show off what you have done to your neighbors.  For more information see: http://www.kingcounty.gov/environment/stewardship/nw-yard-and-garden.aspx