Water Issues - Yard

[DickR]

Often you can figure out the problem by studying the topography. Water in the yard could be simply a matter of subsurface water slowly migrating downward from uphill of your yard, or it could be due to a layer of impervious clay-rich soil or ledge with a depression underneath the surface. Often the solution is to intercept water oozing down from uphill with a french drain, and this can work also for other situations by giving water in a wet area a place to go.

I had a problem each spring as the frost was leaving the ground ("mud season"). Water coming slowly downhill to the edge of my driveway for much of the time couldn't go anywhere until the frost had gone, turning the edges into jelly. I had a trench dug at the uphill edge, down 2.5 to 3 feet and the width of the bucket. This I lined with 12-foot wide non-woven drainage fabric. A shallow layer of stone went on top of that, for laying perforated pipe with a pitch toward the ends. The last couple of lengths of pipe were solid, to carry the water to daylight. The pipe was buried in stone to perhaps six inches from the top, the two sides of the fabric were lapped over the stone, and the rest of the stone pile was distributed over the top to protect the fabric.

This has worked wonderfully and has eliminated the mud season issue on the driveway. I've seen that a slow flow of water comes from both ends of the pipe well into the winter. I put some pieces of light plywood over the ends for a couple of feet, because when the flow slowed to a trickle it could freeze. Finally the snow buried the ends and the exposed trenches dowstream, insulating the outlets, but I could hear the trickling of the water below the snow. YMMV.