Has anybody got any idea of how i can stop mygarden flooding.
Wanting a cheapish option as house is rented and dont want to spend loads have tried aerating and adding horti grit to help with drainage
by Tomlinson98
Has anybody got any idea of how i can stop mygarden flooding.
Wanting a cheapish option as house is rented and dont want to spend loads have tried aerating and adding horti grit to help with drainage
by Tomlinson98
32 Comments
Wait until the summer.
Suspect its a layer of clay, youtube is your friend. Few lawn expert in the uk and ireland on there
We where is a very similar situation last year and also in a rental.
We dug a hole abotu 3 mt long, 0.5 wide and .8 deep. Then filled using all the broken brick, concrete etc we could find. Covered with a pirce of weed membrane. Leveled the soil and left it settle for a few months, then raked and grass seeded. Cost was less than £5 and no flooding since.
Coukd just do this along fence line, using the left over soil to the right of the slabs to increase height. Then level and seed.
Middle of harden dig a deep massive hole fill it with broken rocks or gravel or one of those drainage systems or cages refill with top soil seed and done
.
Probably find out you have little to no top soil just bad mud/clay beneath to soil so water takes a while to drain.
Some trees or hedging will soak some of that up
Great spot for a duck pond
We had this i ended up taking an old curtain pole (thin metal tube) and hammering it down as much as i could every 2 square foot, left it over winter and it’s not flooded in the 6 years i’ve done it
Dig a pond
May i ask, was you in the yellow/amber warning yesterday? If so i wouldnt sweat it too much even the best gardens did flood a little through it.
If not.. Aeration, liquid gypsum or digging it up and making a network of french drainage underneath wrapped in textile wrap and pea gravel. Backfilled with soil and grass back on top.
Stormcrate 55 product from Brett Martin does just that
look into agriculture gypsum and/or composted bark, we have a similar issue with heavy clay and that’s the route I think we’re taking
both are turned in and offer different properties to help combat and fix the issue
good luck and have fun
Very similar situation except the whole garden would be a bog & the middle would be ankle depth. 3 years of working compost in to garden & the clay has loosened, our garden now accepts water. we was happy to get the pump out and pump it into a surface water drain so instead of breaking our backs digging we broke our backs shovelling compost and adding plants. Extra points because our garden doesn’t flood and we accidentally made some pretty borders. I don’t know where abouts you are but one of the biggest issues we had was dry summers, they made the clay unable to take on any water without a few weeks notice. We’d have the spinkler out every now during the summer to prevent the garden getting dry enough for the clay to crack & become completely dried out now a days it’s not so much an issue but I like green grass so within reason I did water my grass this year
Mine did this over the new year. Spent 2025 overhauling the lawn to clear it off moss and reseed. Most effective, I believe, was a few rounds of hollow tine aeration. It took a lot of compacted soil out. Also spread a couple of bags of compost over the lawn too. All seems to have helped.
dig big hole. Fill with stones. Cover top with turf again.
More dark soil and shrubs would help a lot.
It’s probably because the ground was so dry and compacted over the summer with the drought, that the water is having issues percolating into the soil. It may just need some time.
French drain and nematodes
You have to dig out and out drainage in. Forks or shrubs won’t suck that all up 👍
Make a soakaway
French drain
It needs Aerating
Pond
Auger drill bit go as deep as you can, fill with horticultural sand top with a few inches of top soil. Do lots of holes, did it in my brothers garden and seems to of worked.
Works very well on clay type soil or compacted soil.
Given that you’re renting the property, I’d be a little careful about some of the solutions here, e.g. excavating the garden and fitting a drainage system etc. If you get an inspection from the LL/agent while you’ve got a metre deep trench several metres long in the back garden you can expect some questions.
After the dry summer, we’ve had a lot of rain in some places. All I would do for now would be to go out and use a garden fork. It’s amazing how much water will disappear if you make a thorough job of this. If you haven’t got a garden fork, it would be a decent investment.
If it were your own house, not rented, I’d still try this first anyway before taking the garden apart.
French drains.
Buy a boat.
It will dry out,
My lawn is on clay and used to flood just like this. I got the longest bit I could find for my SDS+ drill and bored down as deep as it’d go throughout the lawn. Filled the cavities with horti grit to stop them refilling themselves. Presumably some of them made it through the clay, or at least prevented the water from sitting, because no flooding since then. Maybe worth a go.
Dig a tench along the fence to create a sunken border. Then use the soil to raise the lawn in the 2 main areas of flooding as they look lower than the rest. Water finds its way to the lowest part.
This is all you can really do in a rented property as you don’t want to spend too much time and no money on installing french drains or planting conifers which would be a better option.
Put loads of fine organic material there. A thin layer (very fine sprinkling) of spent coffee grounds will invite worms and those wrigglers would create the best drainage. You have good few months to do that. In Spring put some grass seeds and it will be gone once roots start digging it. My kids played football in the garden and it took me years to get rid of compaction. Last year I started throwing coffee grounds and old compost from planters on it and compaction is gone.
Liquid Gypsum – Eutrema. Very effective
It’s something I used to struggle with and I tried forking the lawn but not sure that helped much. I just got to thinking that I wasn’t going to need that bit of the garden if it was raining too much for me to be out there so ended up leaving it be.