One of the important things about the Rain Catcher program goes beyond just catching rain, and that is a focus on neighborhood resilience and climate resilience and response to climate change.

My name is Paige Oliverio.

I'm with the Rain Catcher Austin pilot program, and we've been working on this pilot program in a small area of Austin for little over five years.

The area that was chosen to first pilot this program is connected to Waller Creek.

So we chose to use the watershed boundaries to pilot this program with 1500 residences in Austin.

The Rain Catcher pilot program is designed to educate neighbors about rainwater catchment, creek health, and also neighborhood resilience when you're connecting people to each other.

My name is Larry Morse Im Jessica Morse, and I have a lifetime love of gardening and planting and birds and all the insects.

And so 20 years ago or more, I actually put in a complete xeriscape with native plants in the front yard.

And as we were having more difficulty with flooding, I heard about this program and I thought it would help me have water for all my native plants, and it would also help with rain mitigation, flood mitigation for me and for the neighborhood in Central Texas.

The rain patterns all come rain all at one time, maybe 1 to 3in at a time, and then no rain for several months.

So when we're capturing that optimal window of rain from anywhere from like one inch of rain to three inches of rain, that's going to give us enough rain in storage tanks to last for several months, to support trees throughout a drought, and to keep the soil healthy and rich.

Systems in central Austin are sized for the amount of impervious cover, the amount of hard surfaces that you have on your property, like roofs and sidewalks, decks, driveways.

For the typical.

The average house in central Austin that kind of square footage would dictate usually between, catching 1500 to 3000 gallons of water in some way on your property, holding it and letting it soak in.

We do that with a combination of rain tanks and rain gardens.

So this is a very interesting, grand experiment we did in the front yard.

We have three cisterns, a large one in the front yard, and when it overflows, there are pipes running underground under our path that lead to this basin in the front yard.

And so every so often, if we get, I think it's 2 or 3in of rain or more, it will overflow.

And we'll have for about 24 hours water in that basin when there's not rain and there's not water in the basin.

There are lovely plants, and those plants are selected so that they can withstand that temporary flooding quite often, if it's possible on a property.

We encourage people to plant new trees that help shade the street.

They help mitigate heat island and add beauty to the walking areas and the public areas of the neighborhoods.

With the kind of weather that we get in central Texas.

It's really hard to offset the flash flooding that's typical to this region, and programs like this would not be able to address flooding in that way.

What we can do with this program is address water quality that does end up in the creeks.

And so a program like this keeps rain from just sheeting off of the hard surfaces and even sheeting across a typical lawn that might have fertilizer that'll keep those contaminants from leaving the property, going into the stormwater system and going into the creek.

So a lot of people know what a rain tank is, but a rain garden is a little bit of a mystery for some folks.

It can be as simple as a depression in the ground, a rain garden, that has grasses growing in it.

You can have rain gardens that have, a gentle slope so that you can mow your grasses, but typically rain gardens are going to be vibrant basins shaped into the ground that'll hold a little bit of water for a couple of days and support beautiful perennial plants, tall grasses that have deep roots that help water soak into the soil, and lots of usually lots of perennial plants that come back each year, have lots of flowers, support bees, butterflies, hummingbirds.

In this rain garden we have three types of salvias.

All of them are in the purple family.

We have Mexican honeysuckle.

There are several sedges at the, you know, the edge in the basin where they're going to get more water.

There's woolly stemodia and Lindheimer muhly.

There's a cenizo bush and yellow bells.

There's also Mexican mint marigold, which is edible.

And rain gardens can be really good for, some edible herbs as well.

Sometimes we'll plant rosemary on the high berms, and then we'll plant things like mint and other things that like water down in the basin.

You can get really creative with the types of plants that you have in a rain garden.

Here we usually try to stick with plants that are pretty easy to care for.

A lot of times we have first time gardeners who haven't had something like this to tend to.

So we we suggest plants that are native to the area and that are common at nurseries, so that people can make a garden that they can really tend to if they've never tended gardens before.

Lots of mulch.

We use lots of mulch in the basin after it's shaped.

A rain garden is basically a depression in the ground that's planted and mulched.

Instead of a flat yard surface.

When we remove some of this square footage of just lawn, we are doing a lot to help, revitalize the soil in that space.

Healthy soil is going to hold a lot more water instead of it just running right off into the street.

What happens to is we end up with a cooling effect.

In the summer, we have some data from a heat camera that we've been able to zap the space of a rain garden and get a temperature reading for that area, and then the space right next to it.

That might still be lawn, and get a temperature reading for that area.

And there's been a temperature difference.

So so rain gardens have a cooling effect.

We thought it would take over a year for the plants to come in.

And I think it was like eight months.

It's kind of fun when when the pond does fill up and there's a whole nother ecosystem that comes in and you get bugs and, you know, tadpoles and things like that, it's fun to watch.

We have designed cities to flush water away, away quickly from our homes and our properties.

What happens when we do that is we lose, the soil system that's here that's healthy, that keeps our trees strong and beautiful and keeps our neighborhoods, cool, draws people outside because it's nice and it's beautiful and people connecting to each other.

We created another little pocket over here for us to sit in two chairs so we can just sit and watch our garden.

Even if there's no water in it, there's the grasses are blowing in the breeze and out to the street.

And we have people come up and ask us about this unusual garden we have in our front yard.