Monsoon-Proof Your Yard: Smart Landscaping for Heavy Rain | 013

This is Rodney with landscaping with Zebra scapes. It's the monsoon season. We're going to talk about the rain. What is the monsoon season? 18 years ago, I came out here and saw the first monsoon. I heard about it. I'm like, there is just no way these guys are exaggerating. There's no way it's as much rain. And heard all this hype about the rain the monsoon. I my employer at the time, had like a 1998 truck spark plugs, and we're going up a hill, and it started pouring out of nowhere, and literally, the truck stalled out, and there was, like it was going over the curb, six inches of rain coming down this hill. Over at Lee boulderville, Lee, we had six inches of rain coming down the hill. Over at the Costco, at the ranch, I was floored. You couldn't even we had to stop the truck and the windows wipers couldn't keep up. It was incredible. The amount of rain came down in such a short amount of time. We're doing a project over there, and I that rain happened. I drove away, I come back the next day, and everything we'd done was washed out. I mean, it was completely gone. I mean, the rock, the dirt, was all mixed together. I was just floored by the amount of water in such a short amount of time. Then I learned real quick why you have swells. Why is the pitch so important? I learned real quick the importance of weed fabric for erosion control, and all the things that I started adding up because I never seen anything like it. So if you've been here a while, you get it. You know it. If you're new in the area and you're like, Well, last year it was about last year, it wasn't 2024, we didn't have a monsoon season. It rained very little, even the time before. I mean, we're running dry. We have not had a just a great monsoon season is in a lot of rain, and we need it. We had a very dry winter, so we need the rain. Rain is great. I love the moisture. I love the I love seeing the clouds come in the mountains. I mean, it's exciting to see this in Prescott, Arizona, the clouds, the lightning, the storms come and go. It's so hit and miss from Prescott to Prescott Valley, downpours. And you go to Prescott Valley and it's dry, all those things intrigues me, by mother nature and how God has created this cycle of rain and moisture. So I've learned in the monsoon season the importance of why it's so important to get the the water away away from the house, and honestly, I learned very quickly why it's so important to to water harvest and what that looks like, and understanding it. You know, you see a whole bunch of water come down your slope, and it's like all this water is going to the ditch. Well, why don't I build berms and trap the water around some trees and get those good deep soaks. And I learned like, Well, you got all these drainage ditches. You got to have big rocks. When you do swells, you know, eight to 12 inch and on flat ground, smaller rock, because the water, force of the water can cause those rocks to move. You have a four inch rock and a drain swell that's steep, and a lot of force coming in, that rock will roll right down. We did a ditch A while back, and we had 24 inch size boulders, and it rained, and literally, it just moved fast. Amount of water out of this ditch. That's how much pressure it was coming through. So all those things, there's one thing is extraordinarily difficult to stop, and that is rain and water and pressure. And so when you build a boulder wall, we put leech rock. We put drain pipes behind there to get that water away from the wall, because water and moisture can push walls, can break, crack foundations. All those things has is just so impressive, the force and all that, how it all comes to pass. So saying all that when rain comes, moisture, structural pitch of the pavers to rain gutters, downspouts, ads, pipes, underground, all that stuff has a huge role. Putting grates in even front of your driveway. Sometimes you go down a hill and you go into the driveway, put the grate all the way across the front of your your garage door is very, very critical that you put that grade in there. It's also critical it's installed, right? I mean, if you put that great pitched with the pavers, that water is going to shoot right off that grade. It won't even won't even collect anything goes right into the garage door. So those the pitch of that the grates are very important, and where they at all that is very critical that they're in the proper place, and that the ads pipes are cleaned out. So back to the mountain. Ensuing season. It's exciting. I love it. I love watching the storms. I love watching the lightning, and I just love sitting outside in the evenings and watching it, but the whole time the back of my mind is in my place, ready, what's at the yard, what's happening, what's getting damaged. So it's nice to sit back and know my drainage is taken care of, let it rain and let it pour because I am I got had a plan, and I'm safe. So we look at those things. When you're on a hill where your house is, if you're on the bottom of the hill, atop the hill, or just on flat ground when the rain comes, have you thought about it, and are you getting dumped on, or you dump it on somebody else, or is it water trapped around you what's happened with the water? So that's very important. So back to weed fabric. Everybody says weed fabrics are weed Well, to me, weed fabric does multiple purposes on big slopes. Weed fabric prevents the dirt and the rocks from mixing, so the water cannot get underneath that soil to erode it. That's why it's great to put that weed fabric that felt down underneath the rock on steep slopes and in drainage swells. It's good to put it everywhere. But if you want to cut corners, do not cut it there, because it'll get costly. Is that. So when the water comes it, don't get underneath that rock and stir up that turbulence and move that soil and mix it in with those rocks. It's also important that when you, when you do, do rip wrap, and you go into a culvert area, I always like to build the RIP wrap up and make kind of a screen or a filtering thing that the water comes in, it sits in there and has to hit this spot to prevent soot from going in the culverts in the where it plugs it up. We clean a lot of culverts up because the soot comes off your property within the culverts and it plugs it. The city sees it. They're like, Hey, your property wasn't drained right, properly set, and you got all this soot in our ditch. It's your responsibility. That sucks, especially if you don't you're not aware of it. But yeah, we want to make sure that we keep the soil where it's supposed to be and stabilized. It's also important Be careful. A lot of people do, fire wise, get rid of all scrub oak, wipe it all out. Well, as you see, that's not good. It's good to keep scrub oak on slopes, to cut it down, thin it out. You don't want to land clear, because you have erosion problems. You have washouts and mud will slide down. You know, in the Ranch area and over by iron Springs area, those slopes and those hills, even in presco Lakes, you have these areas where they're steep, people land clear, and they don't put any rock down, and that mud comes right down. I've seen walls just literally collapse in the backyard because of the construction. Guy above land cleared, didn't get property set up, and it causes serious damage. That happens a lot, but the city's cracking down on that now. They're making swells, drainages and areas to collect the water. So what's also like I mentioned, is water harvesting. We want to water harvest is very

useful. It's you get some water coming down a slope, you build a little berm up and plant trees inside. There just a gentle one where it traps, you know, about 50 gallons of water, and that deep soak from the monsoon season, that tree can grow several feet taller a year, depends what tree it is, just because of the deep soaks. We did an experiment about 10 years ago. We had a maple, and we planted in a water harvest area where we trap the water is in a swell. I asked the client, this would make it grow faster. And they like, Great, I'll do it there, even though don't, I don't know why it would. And then we put another one in a mound area, like on top. And about four years later, I stopped by their house again and visiting with them. And the literally, the caliber of the tree was like three inches bigger on the one that was planted in the water basin area where we trapped the water. So that was like, this is way more effective than I didn't even realize how the effect of water harvesting and the deep soaks that the water is trapped and it goes down. So when you think about monsoon season, it comes down hard and fast, couple inches the water sheets off the top. You can see it sheet off. It doesn't penetrate. So when you're like, Oh, we got a we got a half inch of rain, all my plants are good. Well, if you're not necessarily that could have sheeted off, and those plants didn't get hardly any water. So I learned the water harvest. Water harvest is very important if you if your property can handle it, is trapping the water, let the water get there just a small amount, and not even that noticeable, when in the dry season that you can see that little berm, but and not right beside the tree. You want to get four or five feet away from the tree or more to trap that water so it can pool up to, you know, six to eight. Inches deep when it's trapped there, knows that water goes down and deep soaks it. That's the best part of mountains. Mind the monsoon season is that rain, that rain is so much better than the irrigation. It's just that just the trees just come alive. You can see the green of a tree come from a dull green to a bright green, just because the monsoon season, I mean, just one rain, if it's a good, heavy soak, and the water had perked in, man that that those that foliage just brightens up, and it's just so refreshing. It's refreshing to smell the rain, refreshing to see the bright green and just the health of it. And I, you know, I love it. It changed my my vibe and everything about it, seeing the rain come and all that take place. So another thing to talk about is, you got your obviously, you clean the gutters, the downspouts, those are important to clean, but the ads pipe, the hooks of the downspout, we'll make sure that's clean. If that's plugged. You know, you're like, well, it's not that big of a deal. It is because the downspout and the ads pipe right where it connects, it will that's where the water is coming out, where that is right beside your foundation, and it'll bubble out there. Now, if it's happening, don't stress it's not going to ruin it in one season, but I will tell you, over years, the foundation will crack. It will settle. There will be drywall cracks in the house. You need to look at that. Water's not staying there. At the corner, we went to a crawl space a couple years ago. The whole wall was just, you can see water was coming through, and all that was the downspouts were. The person didn't run them out. They were plugged. They weren't even plugged. They just, they didn't even go anywhere. The construction guy cut a corner and just had the downspout like two feet away from the house and plugged it so it just flooded out all around the house. We tore all those up. We put swells in to get the water to drain above ground so that so you can see it not being plugged and it fixed. It went back there two years ago, and it was dry inside. They were happy. And luckily, the new owner saw it and took it and jumped on it right away and like, hey, this can't happen. You know, I know about rain and water and what it can do. So we that's something to look for. A lot of these people. And they build walls. We build a wall and put a drain pipe behind it. It's critical. But that drain pipe behind it, because the monsoon can push that wall out, because the water can have so much force, and those pipes there make it perk out. So it's you just don't want to cut corners when you're building construction, walls to driveways to swells. Don't cut corners when it comes to slopes drainage. That is serious, damage can be done. And you know, five, six years down the road, if it's not done right. So it's also good. When we talk about monsoon, is to fertilize. I recommend fertilizing everything, you know, in June. Get it on there, right around the roots, you know, out there, not right by the tree roots. Get it out there where the drip line is. And that monsoon just it puts that fertilizer down, instead of putting in one little clump by the emitter, which you got to do it if you're doing it in the dry season, so it breaks down. But it's always good to put that fertilizer out there the drip line, the rain comes down. Not only the fertilizer work great for the roots, but it breaks the soil up and not keeps it where it turns so rock hard and in the clay, if it's cleach or whatever, it breaks that up and helps that water perk and it helps the moisture go into the roots. So that's very important. I strongly recommend putting fertilizer around the plants right before the monsoon season to get them to come alive. And you know, it's it makes a huge difference to fertilize before a rainstorm. One other thing, last thing about monsoon season, it's very critical we do we push very hard on pre emergent, getting it down the pre emergent down before the monsoon season. Why? Because pre emergent is sprayed when it rains, it activates it and it distributes it even, and it creates a barrier. The barrier is there so the seeds won't germinate. So you know, when it comes to monsoon, get that pre emergent down. Check your drain underneath your gutters or the drain pipe is, make sure they're cleaned out. And you're like, what could be in their leaves? You don't got all these No. Snakes go in there. Rabbits go in there, and they can't back out, then the snake goes underneath the rabbit. And then, I mean, I pulled out a very nice ice snake before we found dead rabbits in there, because they go in that EDS pipe and they can't back out, and it plugs it up and ends up causing a lot of water issue, drainage problems, you know, gutters overflowing, so it's good to check those. Just put a garden hose up in your gutter, let it run see if water's coming out. If it comes out, you're good to go, and that frees your mind. Thought that when it's pouring down rain, hey, I'm set my gutters are draining. It's all good. Let it rain and that. Eric gives it a great peace of mind to know that you can just relax and enjoy the rainfall. So this is Rodney with Zebra scapes and just touching base on the monsoon season, on what to be prepared for. And it's very critical to walk your property and just to see where you are with the swells, the drainage, the slopes, even in front of your garage. Do you have a catch basin to catch the water? Just take a look around your property. You have any questions, any concerns? Please note below, glad that they discussed these issues with the monsoon season, and I reported the farmers all our neck. We're looking like we could have a decent one this year. It definitely slows down production. Definitely affects the workload, but Mother Nature needs it. I love seeing the green hills, so let it rain. I love seeing the storms. It's exciting. So stay tuned. Appreciate you listening. This is all about the monsoon season and how to be prepared for it. Thanks. You.