Choose a location for your bog garden, keeping in mind how the garden will flow into the overall design of your yard. You can make the diameter of the bog garden as large as you want, digging 2 to 3 feet down at the garden’s deepest site. Line the hole with waterproof liner and puncture it with small holes for drainage. Heavy soil requires more holes, whereas thin or sandy soil drains easier and needs fewer holes poked into the liner.
Cover the liner with small pea gravel to keep the holes from becoming clogged. Next fill the hole with richly organic soil – or use a mixture of sand and whole fiber sphagnum moss. Sphagnum moss naturally occurs in bogs and is the medium most bog plants live in.
If you build your bog as part of a pond, simply extend the liner of the pond to accommodate a bog garden. Remember to leave a permeable wall between the bog and pond so water can pass into the bog while keeping soil out of the pond.
Bog plants like wet feet so it’s imperative that you keep your bog garden wet at all times. You can either manually soak the garden with a hose, or put your hose on a battery-powered timer for automatic wetting. This same technique can be accomplished by running an irrigation line (attached to a timer) to the bog garden.
Once your hole is filled, you can plant potted bog plants at any time. Be careful to maintain the moisture in the bog garden, never letting it dry out. This is especially true the first few weeks after planting the bog plants.
