Gardening

My house faces south on a street that slopes gently west to east, and when it rains (which it has not done lately, unfortunately), the water runs down the sidewalk and/or into the street. So I made a little rain garden on the boulevard strip between the street and the sidewalk - being too old and lazy to to do it myself, I hired a guy to dig out the soil down to about 7" below the level of the sidewalk, then add a couple of inches of new topsoil. It gets a fair amount of sun so I planted catmint, monarda, sedum, milkweed, solidago and a few other native, pollinator-friendly plants that can tolerate both drought and short periods of wet feet. It looks great, but now I'm waiting for some rain - last summer it rained constantly; this summer hardly at all.