Standing Water problems in Your Yard?
Having standing water on a part of your yard is a common problem and sometimes difficult to solve but most of the time it is solvable. There really is nothing worse than having a soggy yard all the time. It also makes a good breading ground for mosquitoes and today West Nile is a concern.
First you need to consider what is happening, and why the water is standing where it is. 
This problem can exist even when you have naturally good draining soil. During periods of heavy rain, water may not be able to soak in fast enough, causing it to run across the top of the ground and eventually find the lowest point. Then it will either leave the property, or get trapped.
If you have naturally good draining soil, the trapped water usually soaks in fairly quickly. But if you have heavy clay soil, the water lies there and the soil underneath becomes very compacted, and then the problem gets even worse. The more water that stands, the worse the drainage gets.
People quite often start by thinking of what kind of a tree, or what kind of shrubs can be planted in a wet area to dry it up. This won’t work as almost all plants won’t survive in an area where the soil is soggy for extended periods of time. The roots need to breathe, and planting a tree or shrub in a wet area probably will kill it. Another common approach is to try and fill the area with topsoil. This can work, but often it only shifts the wet area to another spot not far away.
So what can be done?
Property with natural fall:
If you are lucky enough to have some natural fall to your property, or a drainage ditch nearby, 
this problem is easy to solve. Some of you may even live in a new home development and have a storm water catch basins already installed in your backyard. This is a good thing.
If you are fortunate enough to have a yard like this, where you have a spot to drain water into, the problem is easy to solve. Make sure though that you check with your local officials before you do anything that involves things you don’t own like a catch basin or a ditch that is not on your yard.
If everything is ok all you have to do is buy some 4” perforated plastic drainage pipe from your local building supply center. The easiest and best kind for this purpose is the flexible round pipe that comes in 100’ rolls. This type of perforated drainage pipe has small slits all around the pipe allowing water to enter the pipe so it can be carried away.
Start by digging a trench from the center of the low area you are trying to drain, to the point that you intend to drain it to. Using a level you need to make sure that your pipe runs downhill all the way with a fall of 6” for every 100’ of pipe. The trench doesn’t need to be very deep to start off with, only deep enough that the pipe will be covered with 6 or 8” of soil. Once the trench is dug just lay the pipe in making sure you insert a cap onto the top end of the pipe to keep soil out of the pipe. Cover the pipe with some crushed stone, and then backfill the trench with soil. The stone creates a space around the pipe so that the water can more easily find its way into it. Crushed stone is usually inexpensive and is clean and free from dirt. Make sure that the bottom end of the pipe is free from obstruction so that the water exits the pipe freely.
When you don’t have anywhere to drain the water to:
Here you can install something called a French drain system that actually carries the 
water away from the low area. It allows the water to seep into the ground over a larger distance, and down where the soil is not quite so compacted.
When installing this type of system, you do everything similar to above, except instead of draining the water to a lower area, you can send it in any direction you like. In fact a good idea is to dig a number of shorter trenches like spokes on a wheel, all heading away from the area where the water stands. Again using a level, make sure your trenches slope away from the wet spot so that area will dry out. What is going to happen is that during times of heavy rain the low area is still going to trap water, but much of that water is going to seep into the drain pipes which will hold the water that eventually will leach into the soil under each trench. Because this soil has not been compacted by the standing water and the baking sun, it will accept the water.
This won’t happen nearly as fast as if you could just drain the water to a ditch, but at least you will have a mechanism in place that will eventually disperse the water back into the soil. It’s a lot easier to drain 200 gallons of water into a series of trenches that total 100 lineal feet, than it is to expect that water to leach into a 10’ by 10’ area that is hard and compact.
No more soggy yard and a better control of those pesky mosquitoes.
Continually developing “ideas for outdoor living”
May 25th, 2009 at 12:08 am
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May 25th, 2009 at 3:51 am
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May 25th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
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May 27th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Great information. I fell into the second category and had to install a french drain from my back yard all the way around the side of the house to the front. I had a horrific drainage problem that the previous homeowners said never flooded the sunroom. Yeah right. Anyway, I think I’ve got the problem fixed but still have a lot of landscaping left to do in the back.
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